On Trump’s dog whistling to neo-Nazis:

Why Americanism is the incorrect response to fascism

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By Daniel K. Buntovnik, 17 August 2017

A political dog whistle: “a coded message communicated through words or phrases commonly understood by a particular group of people, but not by others” [x].

Donald Trump sent a loud and clear whistle to his doggish packs of fanatical far-right supporters in a speech delivered on August 12th, 2017 regarding the wave of violence set off the day before in Charlottesville, Virginia by a rally which drew a historic number of fascist bigots espousing a jumble of neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, “alt-right”, and “white nationalist” genocidal and segregationist ideologies. (Given the name which organizers gave to the rally, one of its main raisons d’être, in addition to preventing the removal of monuments to the Pro-Slavery Rebellion, seems to have been to overcome these rather insignificant ideological discrepancies among adherents of right-wing politics in the United States of America). The most notable violent incident occurred when a member of a contingent of left-wing, anti-fascist protesters named Heather Heyer was killed [x] and a number of others injured by a neo-Nazi terrorist using a muscle car to plow into the counter-protesters. The attacker has been identified as James Fields, who was photographed before the attack standing in formation with a right-wing gang calling itself “Vanguard America”, wearing the group’s Donald Trump golfing outfit-inspired uniform, and holding a shield with the group’s emblem, a Celtic cross made of two crossing fasces, thereby combining two well-known symbols of neo-fascism into one [x]. Vanguard America is, in turn, a member group of a larger umbrella organization called “Nationalist Front” (formerly known as “Aryan Nationalist Alliance”) which brings together a variegated panoply of Klan, neo-Nazi, and Christian Identity groups.

Caught in the center of the above photograph is the white supremacist James Fields. Despite a contradictory attempt by the Nationalist Front sub-group Vanguard America to disavow the neo-Nazi terrorist [x], “Commander” Jeff Schoep of the “National Socialist Movement” and founder of the Nationalist Front, issued a statement confirming James Fields’s belonging to the Nationalist Front camp by retweeting a video of the terrorist attack which showed anti-racist activists rushing to the weaponized muscle car which had just been used as a murder weapon in an effort to render it inoperable and thereby prevent further racist, anti-leftist killing. In the retweet, Schoep issued his own statement in which he said “Antifa attacking car [i.e., the terrorist murder weapon] with ball bats. This is what we faced in Cville, armed antifa, & city allowed it,” [x] (my emphasis). In using the phrase “This is what we faced” in this context (a video of Fields “allegedly” running over participants in an anti-racist demonstration in his car), it can be confirmed that the Nationalist Front leader views the murderer as part of his group. In addition to this, the neo-Nazi leader demonstrates an incredible level of hypocrisy in criticizing anti-Nazi counter-demonstrators for being armed with bats, given the well-publicized images of right-wing, paramilitary-style militias armed with assault rifles which were out in force for the “Unite the Right” rally [x].

Despite the fact that the nature of the conflict playing out in Charlottesville was clearly that of supporters of genocidal fascism versus their opponents, Trump adamantly attributed guilt for the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” to “many sides”, emphasizing the words “many sides” by pausing to repeat them a second time in an insincere fashion [x]. While a number of Democrats and “liberals” criticized Trump for failing to identify the guilty party by saying some words along the lines of “radical white nationalist terror”, many in the Democratic Party actually echoed his dog whistle endorsement of American-style fascism by making appeals to “national unity” and “American values” [x].

By fixating on Trump’s lack of explicit condemnation of the neo-Nazi and Ku Klux groups at the expense of paying the slightest attention to Trump’s exploitation of the Nationalist Front terrorist attack as another opportunity to promote more American nationalism, those whose “opposition” to Trump is superficial set up an easy out for him to redeem himself and atone for his “mistake” by fulfilling their wish and making a short pronouncement in which, after repeating in paraphrase what he had already said two days earlier, he said, “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans” [x]. Notwithstanding the fact that Trump made and has fulfilled an explicit campaign pledge to continue the Obama era practice of killing people for nothing other than the blood in their veins, i.e. the kindredness of their blood to that of stigmatized individuals [x], here Trump really only condemns the hate groups insofar as they “cause violence” and behave criminally. This is not a condemnation of the KKK, neo-Nazism and white supremacists and their existence as such (i.e. their right to organize and operate in society), but merely empty words against their illegal tactics, which are inevitably attributed to the infamous figure of the “lone wolf” (as if these “lone” wolves were the only “bad apples” amongst the otherwise upstanding members of the neo-Nazi community). Even American liberals such as Glenn Greenwald continue to defend neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates, so long as they don’t “cause violence” and employ legal methods of struggle, despite the fact that laws in a number of other liberal bourgeois democracies proscribe things such as the use of Nazi symbolism, Holocaust denial, and hate speech [x]. This shows that there is bipartisan support for the legal status of neo-Nazism, which is not a given, even within the confines of bourgeois democracy.

Despite Trump’s tepid condemnation of the neo-Nazis’ illegal tactics and bipartisan support for neo-Nazism’s “right” to fester upon society, on August 15th he spoke publicly about Charlottesville for a third time, arguing that the “alt-left”, a made-up term which serves only to draw a false equivalence between the political Left and the the far-right [x], shared responsibility for the terrorist attack on leftists in Charlottesville [x].

Shortly after the August 14th comments about “criminals and thugs”, Trump went on to say, “We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. We are equal under the law. And we are equal under our Constitution.” This is patently false, since Trump’s 90 day travel ban on citizens of six Muslim-majority countries, now halfway expired, hinges on the argument that not all human beings are to be treated equally by the U.S. legal system and Constitution. Once again Trump has rhetorically marshalled the citizenry with Nationalist ideology. This is at a time when his regime appears to be making good on its promise to outdo the previous record-holder, Obama, in effecting more deportations of alien “Others” from the United States [x]. The boilerplate platitude about the U.S.A. being “a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal”, lifted from the Declaration of Independence, is practically meaningless in this context, since chattel slavery outlasted this declaration by almost a century. The phrase “We are all equal” was as incongruent with the real situation of 1817 as it is with the reality of 2017, when so many of us are denied access to basic human rights, treated unequally by the law, and forced by lack of freedom from want and fear to perform unpaid surplus labor during much of our waking hours.

A sober analysis of the facts will reveal that there can be no combination between “Americanism” and anti-fascism. This “anti-fascism” which bases itself on Americanism is ineffective at best, and it is its own form of fascism at worst. I call it the right-wing of “anti-fascism” because, in contrast to the left-wing of anti-fascism, which calls for a multinational revolution against fascism and the conditions themselves which produce it, the right-wing (pseudo) “anti-fascism” calls for liberals (falsely identified with the political Left despite belonging more to the center, in proximity to the Right) to combine with conservatives in a sick display of “national unity”.

What right-wing “anti-fascist” commentary which continues to rhetorically marshal the national “we” (the quintessential subject of fascist reaction) fails to take note of in Trump’s initial response to the deadly Nationalist Front attack in Charlottesville is that it is not merely his “failure” to identify the bigoted antagonizing party to the conflict which is significant, but the way in which Trump’s speech whistles to right-wing dogs, and carries forward their ideology of American nationalism. And by wallowing in Americanism, the would-be opponents of Trump remain tethered to the fascist body, like a gangrened limb.

Expressions of this all-American “anti-fascism” appeared to rise up organically on Twitter, where #ThisIsNotUS became a trend [x]. Not long after that, an anti-“Alt-Right” meme modeled on a World War II era poster featuring the character “Uncle Sam” appeared and began to spread online. This image is worth discussing, as a brief analysis of it will begin to demonstrate that the nationalism of Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, and centrists and moderates is much closer to the nationalism of the Nationalist Front terrorists than it is to antifascist internationalism.

“Uncle Sam” is of course a personification of the United States and the first thing that stands out about him, besides his striped pants and starred vest, is his whiteness, made overwhelming by his pure white hair. Clearly this symbolic representation of a nation embodied in an individual human being conveys something about the artist’s idea of what “kind” of human being is “typical” or representative of that nation’s hundreds of millions of people. As one writer puts it, “Political cartoons” were (and still are) a reflection of the perceived “racial conditions of a society” [x]. So right away, Uncle Sam is an expression of white nationalism.

Even more problematic is the fact that this particular version of Uncle Sam has been lifted from a World War II era poster which features the racial slur “Jap”. The anonymous(?) creator of the “Stop the ‘Alt-Right’” poster has even kept the same style of bold red lettering at the top of the poster and calqued the “We’ll finish the job” into “We’ll beat ’em” at the bottom, so you know where the inspiration came from.

Uncle Sam has a checkered history of being used to promote the exact same racist demands that neo-Nazis and “white nationalists” demand today, demands like booting out racially othered immigrant populations, treating the “white race” as superior to others, and building an “Imperium” on top of annexed foreign lands.

This image from 1899 shows Uncle Sam as a disciplinarian schoolmaster. The Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba (territories annexed by the United States during the late 19th century) are represented by racist caricatures of dark-skinned children. Colonialism was often justified by the alleged need to bring “civilization” to the “child-like races”. The white children sitting behind them are studious and the names of states are written on their books, showing that they represent the American states which by that time had become predominantly populated by white settlers. The text on the blackboard reads in part, “England has governed her colonies whether they consented or not. By not waiting for their consent she has greatly advanced the world’s civilization. The U.S. must govern its new territories with or without their consent until they can govern themselves.”

We have sampled just two out of the many Uncle Sam images with strongly white nationalist messages which have been produced over the years, but I think this is enough to understand the point. More white nationalism is not a good response to the “white nationalism” which manifested in Charlottesville. (Note: I place scare-quotes around this term because, like “alt-right”, it is merely a re-branding of white supremacist groups long understood to be of a neo-Nazi nature, made in an effort to improve their public image).

Yet another expression of this pseudo-antifascist All-Americanism in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville began to propagate itself in the online spheres, where it was “liked” by hundreds of thousands of people and probably seen by many more, when someone decided that those who think their own American nationalism to be of the “good” sort would get a kick out of seeing a clip from a 1947 U.S. military propaganda film called Don’t be a Sucker.

In the particular scene which went viral [x], we encounter a character who is meant to be an “obvious” fascist. He’s standing on a soapbox, addressing a small crowd, railing against the quadruple scourge of “Negroes”, “alien foreigners”, “Catholics”, and “Freemasons”. In the crowd we see two men in particular who are listening to him. One of them is later revealed to be an immigrant from Hungary and the other, a natural-born American.

The “native” American nods his head in agreement with everything the fascist says until eventually the latter starts railing against Freemasons.

“Masons? What’s wrong with the Masons? I’m a Mason. Hey, that fella’s talking about me,” the man says.

“Before he said ‘Masons,’ you were ready to agree with him,” the second man says.

“Yes, but he was talking about–What about those other people?” the first man says.

Next, and here we get to the “antifascist” climax of the clip, the second man explains, “In this country we have no other people, we are American people.”

Now compare the “We have no other people,” message of Don’t be a Sucker with what Trump actually said on Saturday the 12th day of August 2017, after a Nationalist Front neo-Nazi had just committed a murderous terrorist attack directed against left-wing individuals standing up and demonstrating against racism and fascism:

“No matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country. We love our God. We love our flag. We’re proud of our country. We’re proud of who we are. So we want to get this situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. We want to see where we’re going wrong as a country” [x].

The message from the 1947 U.S. military propaganda film (“We [Americans] have no other people,”) is exactly the same as that which Trump had conveyed by rhetorically marshalling “we” as the national subject in his first response to Charlottesville. Not “we” as in human beings. Not “we” as in opponents of fascism as such. But “we” as in citizens of the U.S.A. “We” as in unquestioning participants in mindless ritual displays of flag-worshipping patriotism. Trump’s boilerplate nonsense about “no matter our color, creed, religion or political party” might sound superficially inclusive and unbigoted to a simpleton. But by excluding nationality, Trump is already excluding the alien “Other” and marshalling the nationalistic body politic. Just think how nonsensical it would sound if he had said, “No matter our nationality, citizenship, migrant status, or if our visas are expired, we are all Americans first.” Simply put, no, “we” are not “all Americans” and dominant culture sure as hell does not treat everyone as though they were “all the same”. This tacky Americanism is a particularly malicious way to respond to a neo-Nazi attack, since neo-Nazis have a long history of attacking the “other people”, not those who are comfortably seen as integral to the nationalistic body politic.

“We” hardly need a newsflash to tell us that James Fields and his neo-Nazi and Klan brethren in the Nationalist Front are citizens of the U.S.A. By saying that “our” Americanism comes before anything else, Trump unifies “us” with the neo-Nazi terrorist and all his American partners who, there is no doubt, would be much more inclined to say, “We love our God and our Country and we’re proud of it,” than those of us on the left-wing of genuine anti-fascism, a significant proportion of us being (1) non-believers in the God of the billionaire Trump (that god which is Money), (2) haters of the system of nation-states which dislocates us from our loved ones, kills migrants, and is the basis of every modern war, (3) adequately aware of and versed in the history of fascist bourgeois nationalism and its mass psychology so as to be immune to all of the cues and triggers designed to induce the crocodile emotions of patriotism, and (4) ashamed, ashamed to be marshalled by this sexually predatory, fake-tanned old man into his subject and told what we must love and be proud of.

According to this way of thinking (which says, “We are all Americans first,”) our Americanism precedes, and is therefore more important and reigns supreme over the fact of whether, for example, we belong to a fascist “political party” or an antifascist one, whether we are actively working towards the orchestration of genocide or slated to be exterminated, whether we are perpetrators of hate-crime or victims, or whether we pay other people to produce untold sums of money for us or we work for other people to get paid hopefully enough to make ends meet. For a materially powerful person who is a representative of the ruling class to rhetorically marshal any of the latter categories into artificial unity with the former is to promise physical violence and annihilation. It is to predestine the elimination of “other people” and the prevention of an “Other” consciousness. It is to combine the promise of “We have no other people,” with the resolve to make it so in reality. It is a declaration of war on “Other” people, i.e. “alien” social elements, the ones who do not love the “God” of Trump, who do not love a piece of cloth, who do not see themselves as Americans first and foremost, who identify themselves in other ways instead, who have other priorities.

The fasces is symbolic of the fascist mentality.

The fasces, the symbol of the Vanguard America gang members seen in this photo and which was also carried by the murderous neo-Nazi James Fields, is a signifier of this idea that national identity should reign supreme in each individual’s psyche. A fasces is a bundle of sticks which stands for the notion that a nation’s citizenry are stronger when collectively bound together than as twigs which, taken individually, snap easily. As a symbol of national unity, the fasces represents the idea that class struggle within the nation is “divisive” and weakens it. By calling for the members of the national body politic to put their civic identity as “Americans” in a position of supremacy over whatever other affiliations they may have, including as members of socioeconomically, racially, or sexually oppressed classes, Trump — and the so-called “progressive” Democrats — attack class consciousness and endorse the fascist mentality.

In the nationalist utterance of Trump, “We are all Americans first”, we can also parse out a deeper significance to the placement of the word “all” in front of the word “American”. Its appearance here is to signify not only that “All of us are Americans”, but that “We are All-Americans.”

The term “All-American” is frequently employed to describe that which is either “composed wholly of American elements” or “representative or typical of the U.S. or its ideals” [x]. Like the somewhat antiquated term “Great-Russian”, which was “used formerly in distinguishing ethnic Russians from other constituent peoples of the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire” [x], the term “All-American” has long been used to distinguish between those who have the traits of a “typical” American (white, Anglo-Saxon or Germanic heritage, Protestant, etc.) and those who are marked, wholly or partially, by some “alien” stigmata. By saying, “We are All-Americans,” Trump dog whistles a white nationalist conceptualization of what an “American” is and who “we” are.

This idea of “all-Americanism” is conveyed in the film The Good Shepherd, in the following bit of dialogue between two characters:

Joseph Palmi: We Italians, we got our families and we got the church. The Irish, they have the homeland. The Jews, their traditions. Even the [N word], they got their music. What about you people Mr. Carlson, what do you have?

Edward: The United States of America, the rest of you are just visiting [x].

Several Urban Dictionary entries for “All-American” also detail the racist connotations of this word. Here is the top Urban Dictionary definition of “All-American” [x]:

A word that describes a certain type of ultra-conservative white person who lives in a small rural or suburban towns in middle America. This term is exclusively used by white people to describe their perfect vision of what they believe embodies a true American person. Whites fail to realize just how racist the term “All American” is. If only white people from middle America can be “All American”, that must mean that all the blacks, latinos, asians, native americans and mixed people can never fully be regarded as Americans by the oppressive white society. Think about it, if you are born black in this country, white people will call you “African American”. But the majority of black people born in here in America have never been to Africa and will never go there in their entire lifetime. Its really fucking racist. (Submitted by “thagoldenchild” on May 9, 2008)

Another popular definition for “All-American”:

A conformist who is blindly patriotic, votes Republican not because the values of the party are true to them, but because “everyone else is gay” or they’re scared the terrorists will kill them and does whatever anyone wants for them. All American males usually have blond buzz cuts and are tall, well built and stupid. All American girls will usually have long blond hair, and stupid. They can be of any class, but often tend to be richer, or at least born in a rich suburban family. Still, most rednecks are all American, too. (Submitted anonymously on January 23, 2005)

Shifting slightly, we move now from “all-Americans” to the next bit of the dog whistle: “Americans first”. This is a clear allusion to the “America First” slogan which was adopted by the Trump presidential election campaign in 2016, when he promised that it would be “the major and overriding theme” of his draconian capitalist regime [x]. The slogan harkens back to the “America First Committee”, which was a large anti-war group that petitioned to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War, rendered problematic by the presence of antisemitic and Nazi-sympathizing forces. A latter day “America First Committee” was formed in 1980 by Arthur Jones, a longtime neo-Nazi who took part in the infamous neo-Nazi marches in Illinois in 1978 after the American Civil Liberties Union won them the right to provoke Holocaust survivors by marching through their neighborhoods [x, x]. (Incidentally, the ACLU came under fire in connection to the neo-Nazi mayhem in Charlottesville for, under the pretense of protecting free speech, actually defending the right of the terrorist groups to publicly assemble in armed assault formations and immediately communicating misinformation to the public about the neo-Nazi vehicular assault on leftists that implied that it was accidental and provoked by rock-throwing, although the ACLU later later retracted this false claim [x, x]).

Part of what is significant here is that the latter day America First Committee is one of the founding members of the previously mentioned Aryan Nationalist Alliance, the umbrella organization composed of dozens of smaller Klan, neo-Nazi, and Christian Identity factions whose goal is to “unite the right”. According to a press release from another one of the co-founder groups, the Aryan Nationalist Alliance was formed on April 22, 2016 (two days after Adolf Hitler’s birthday, commonly memorialized by neo-Nazi groups). The Aryan Nationalist Alliance later changed its name to Nationalist Front and, in April 2017, Vanguard America joined the so-called Nationalist Front. Two out of the ten speakers who were slated to publicly address the crowds at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally are Nationalist Front members: Michael Hill and Matt Heimbach [x].

Below is the flyer for the “Unite the Right” rally showing the presence of two members of the Nationalist Front on the official list of speakers, which was shared on Twitter in June [x] by “Alt-Right” white nationalist head of the “National Policy Institute” Richard Spencer (who collaborated with Trump’s chief speechwriter Stephen Miller as members of the Duke Conservative Union at Duke University in 2007 [x]).

Michael Hill is the leader of the neo-Confederate “League of the South”, while Matt Heimbach is the leader of the “Traditionalist Worker Party”. Both the League of the South and the Traditionalist Worker Party are member organizations of the Nationalist Front. These two men, along with Jeff Schoep, “Commander” of the “National Socialist Movement” (the largest neo-Nazi organization in the United States) appear to be the main leaders of the Nationalist Front [x], although a press release published by the NSM indicates that the Nationalist Front is essentially Schoep’s brainchild; there it is noted that it was Schoep who “unveiled a Historic document detailing a plan for the Aryan Nationalist Alliance” (now renamed Nationalist Front).

Below is the press release, retrieved from “NSM Magazine Summer/Fall 2016”. NSM and the Nationalist Front seem to have done a half-assed job trying to delete references to Nationalist Front member groups like the “Aryan Terror Brigade”, probably realizing that this is not a good look for an organization that claims to “reject illegal, seditious and violent conduct as a model of political change” and be “dedicated to a peaceful process of gaining power”. References to Aryan Terror Brigade and several other founding groups listed in the original press release have been scrubbed from both the Nationalist Front website (nfunity.org) and an NSM web page relating the information about the “historic alliance formed by U.S. white nationalists”. On a similar note, NSM and their NF front organization appear to have made an effort to “go mainstream” and win more adherents by phasing out their use of the swastika and terms like “Aryan” in favor of symbols like the othala rune and terms like “Alt-Right” [x]. Nevertheless, the NSM website (nsm88.org) continues to host a PDF file of the “NSM Magazine Summer/Fall 2016” where these groups, which are obviously incompatible with the objective of bringing neo-Nazism into the mainstream, are listed as founders of Nationalist Front. The Southern Poverty Law Center also confirms this list of NF founders [x].

The press release also reveals some important facts about the composition of the Nationalist Front which the road rage racist killer James Fields and official speakers at the “Unite the Right” rally belong to. Among its founding member organizations we find numerous groups with penchants for racially-motivated terrorism and violent crime. Let’s just sample a few of these:

One is the so-called “Phineas Priesthood”. This is said by some to be more of a “meme” than an actual organization [x]; an ideology which is nothing but a glorified justification for committing racially-motivated murder. As one source puts it: “Phineas priests take their name from the biblical figure Phinehas in the book of Numbers, who is described as brutally murdering an Israelite man for having sex with a foreign woman, who he also kills. Members of the Phineas Priesthood — which people ‘join’ simply by adopting the views of the movement — are notoriously violent, and some adherents have been convicted of bank robberies, bombing abortion clinics, and planning to blow up government buildings” [x]. The fact that the Nationalist Front names the “Phineas Priesthood” as a founding member of the organization signals that the murdering of so-called “race-mixers” and “race-polluters” serves as an ideological point of reference for what the group hopes to achieve and the methods they are willing to employ as means to those ends.

Another Nationalist Front founding organization is the previously mentioned Aryan Terror Brigade. Members of the Aryan Terror Brigade were convicted of carrying out racist assaults on Muslim-looking people in 2013 [x]. The group is said to be a branch of Combat 18 [x, x], a British neo-Nazi group which claimed responsibility for the terrorist bombing campaign targeting Black British, South Asian, and LGBT communities in London which took place during the days surrounding April 20, 1999, killing three people and causing four others to lose limbs. A group called the “White Wolves”, an offshoot of Combat 18, also claimed responsibility for the bombings [x]. (Another Nationalist Front co-founder is listed as “White Wolves Invictus”).

“Aryan Strikeforce” is another Nationalist Front co-founder group which claims “Combat 18 International” affiliation, as shown on the VKontake profile of the group’s founder Joshua Michael Steever (“Hatchet”), who also founded Aryan Terror Brigade before being kicked out of it and has a history of making terroristic threats [x, x]. Strikeforce is the name of a Combat 18 publication which, before the London Nail Bomb attacks, declared that “The [only] answer is an international terror/sabotage campaign” [x, x]. Numerous members of Aryan Strikeforce were arrested in 2016 and 2017 and are said to have been amassing machine guns [x].

David Copeland, nicknamed “The London Nail Bomber”, was the only person convicted of carrying out the 1999 neo-Nazi bombings in London, claiming to have acted as a “lone wolf” [x]. In part by relying on the doctrine of “leaderless resistance”, neo-Nazi organizations can shift responsibility for all of their illegal actions onto rogue “lone wolves” and enjoy the protection of the capitalist state and “free speech”-defending liberals who back up their above-the-board activism and organizing which pretends to be strictly interested in legal activity. This is a sham pretense. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the nature of an organization founded by groups like “Aryan Terror Brigade” and “White Wolves Invictus”.

It’s worth expanding on one point here and noting that the London Nail Bomber was a member of another British neo-Nazi group, “coincidentally” also named “National Socialist Movement” (like “White Wolves”, the British NSM was also an offshoot of Combat 18 [x]). The British NSM was led by David Myatt, a man who is in turn widely acknowledged to have used various pseudonyms in leading a cult called the “Order of Nine Angles”, which embraces “traditional Satanism” and neo-Nazism, and advocates the practice of human sacrifice as a form of Hitlerian eugenics. In my post “What is Net-Centric Warfare?” from November 2016, I showed how the facelift given to neo-Nazism (by adopting the “Alt-Right” identity and using a cartoon frog called “Pepe” or “Kek” in place of a swastika) has borrowed heavily from Satanic strains of neo-Nazism in developing something called the “Cult of Kek”, which revolves around the belief in “meme magick” and the appearance of Pepe the Frog as a theophany of the Ancient Egyptian god Kek. This runs parallel to the neo-Nazi and U.S. military-linked “Temple of Set”, another Satanic cult appropriating from the mythology of Ancient Egypt.

This cryptic far-right “spirituality” seems to be further manifested by the fact that another keynote speaker at the “Unite the Right” rally was the eccentric eugenics advocate [x] Augustus Sol Invictus, currently a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida, who began making sensationalized headlines two years ago in part for claiming to have sacrificed a goat and drank its blood. “Sol Invictus” is said to identify as “pagan” [x]. Tellingly, comparative religion scholar Mattias Gardell notes in Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism that the eugenics-advocating “Order of Nine Angles” cult describes its brand of Satanism as a “militant paganism” [x] derived from the “solar cults of Albion”, i.e. sun-worshipping cults of ancient Britain. “Sol Invictus” means “unconquered sun”.

Another leading member of the Nationalist Front is Michael Tubbs, head of the Florida section of the League of the South. Tubbs was convicted in the 1990s for his involvement in a plot to start a race war by attacking African-American and Jewish-owned businesses [x, x]. Tubbs has since been released from prison and “was photographed [participating] in several brawls” during the “Unite the Right” rally [x].

The NSM is no stranger to terrorism itself. The case of Samuel James Johnson, a “former” NSM member (because it’s always a “former” member) who went on to found his own “Aryan Liberation Movement” went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 (see Johnson v. United States [x]). Despite plotting to conduct paramilitary-style attacks on a Mexican consulate and left-wing bookstores and assassinate “liberals” [x], Johnson was not tried as a terrorist but as an “armed career criminal”. Uncannily, lawyers presented arguments on behalf of the neo-Nazi on April 20, 2015. The Supreme Court’s decision seems to have been favorable to the neo-Nazi terrorist plaintiff, ruling that the Armed Career Criminal Act by which he had been sentenced to 15 years of prison was unconstitutional.

All of this goes to show that the fascist white supremacist who had conducted the deadly terrorist attack just prior to Trump’s speech last Saturday (August 12, 2017) was, in acting as a member of the Nationalist Front, therefore formally associated with, not only the NF member groups mentioned above which have well documented histories of and connections to terrorism, but also the neo-Nazi organization known as the America First Committee.

Donald Trump’s response to this situation was to invoke a neo-Nazi slogan, a neo-Nazi slogan which has been a neo-Nazi slogan, continuously, for at least 37 years. A neo-Nazi slogan which the Nationalist Front sub-group which the murderous fascist was seen standing in uniformed formation with, Vanguard America, has used in its own propaganda:

Trump’s response has also been to blame the victims of this terrorist attack, the political Left and to make “But not all…” type excuses for the attendees of a rally to defend monuments to Pro-Slavery Rebellion which was officially billed as having multiple speakers affiliated with the Nationalist Front, a group founded by people who openly pine for “an international terror campaign” and spiritual rewards for the act of murdering “race-polluters”.

In uttering the despicable words, “We are all-Americans First,” Trump has blown a dog whistle. When right-wing dogs hear those despicable words, what they understand is:

Transmodernity is Burning:

A Schizoanalysis of Transracialism and Transgenderism in Paris is Burning

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By Daniel K. Buntovnik, 13 February 2017

What is transraciality, and who is transrace? The Rachel Doležal affair invites the question

There is debate about the meaning of the term “transrace”. The prominence of discourse around the term “transrace” was elevated in the mid 2010s in the wake of the sensationalized story of Rachel Doležal, a woman who is said to have a verified genealogical tree which traces back to the peoples of Northern and Central Europe (but who is also said to have family members [in-law] of Sub-Saharan African descent), in addition to having deceived people in the Pacific Northwestern region of the United States of America into believing that she was a Black person with a pale complexion, acting as an NAACP leader whilst assuming this identity. She apparently did this by dyeing her hair darker and perming it, using artificial skin pigmentation-modifying (‘fake tan’) products, and perhaps affecting her speech with Ebonics elements. In the wake of the scandal over Doležal’s apparent deception, some individuals added to the discourse by denouncing the use of the term “transrace” to describe individuals like Doležal; they claimed instead that “transrace” should only be used to describe individuals who are raised by adoptive parents of a racial grouping deemed “other” to that of their biological ancestors. (See here, for example). While I do not wish to dwell excessively on this debate over the one “true” definition of the term “transrace”, I felt it was important to start out by acknowledging it before we delve into the topic of transracialism. And yet, another possible definition has been disconsidered: that the adjective “transrace” may fittingly be used to describe individuals who exist in a multigenerational process of racial transitioning.

Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle. I turn away from these inspectors of the Ark before the Flood and I attach myself to my brothers, Negroes like myself. To my horror, they too reject me. They are almost white. And besides they are about to marry white women. They will have children faintly tinged with brown. Who knows, perhaps little by little. . . .

Following the intergenerational/transgenerational distinction developed by theorists in the field of psychogenealogy such as Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, we might call the form of transracialism evoked by Fanon intergenerational, because the racial transition occurs as the result of a conscious effort made by the ancestor on behalf of the descendant, so that the latter may be accepted into a racial category to which the former did not belong, while we might call a multigenerational transracialism transgenerational when it occurs unconsciously, without the individuals involved becoming aware of the process, perhaps due to unconscious absorption of white supremacist cultural values.

Due to white supremacy, the racial transitioning process in America has usually gone in the opposite direction to that observed in the case of Rachel Doležal. That is to say that white supremacy encouraged individuals of the Sub-Saharan African diaspora in the United States of America to long for whiteness, a racial ideal which was construed as an unstigmatized personal state for the individual. American literary works such as Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal(1947)and Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1933)have immortalized these tales of “tragic mulattos” and “tragic quintroons” like Peola and Neil Kingsblood, protagonists of the aforementioned works for whom being racially “outed” spells personal catastrophe. The upwardly mobile individual is also always white-wardly mobile in a global economy constructed around the fiscal elevation of those racialized as “white”. Perhaps this is why many found the acts which Rachel Doležal performed to be somehow troubling. She achieved upward mobility, gaining a certain social prestige in becoming an NAACP leader, by adopting the mannerisms and the get-up (which we might well qualify as “drag”) that she needed in order to perform an historically stigmatized racial identity.

“Drag” typically evokes the practice of male “queens” dressing up and behaving as if they were women. This is, however, a limited understanding. In Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, we see that the drag shows performed at late 20th century balls in New York City consisted not only in the male adoption of feminine clothing and mannerisms (i.e. the gender-bending “drag queens” of stereotypical lore), but that these performances also operated across the racial plane of social difference. And the expanded possibilities of drag which the film depicts do not end there; race and gender are not the only modalities upon which drag operates. As other critics have pointed out, the film “extends this argument [that drag is a practice that can potentially draw attention to the imitative nature of gender itself through its parodic repetition of gender norms] to include the constructed nature of race and class identity as well as gender identity” [See: Lauren Levitt, “Reality Realness: Paris is Burning and RuPaul’s Drag Race” in Interventions Journal (7 November 2013)].

In a segment of the film devoted to the exposition of this class and race-nonconforming form of drag, we see individuals historically stigmatized as Black “homosexuals” perform power drag by symbolically taking on the roles of members of the U.S. military and “successful” (ruling class) white American individuals. Not only do the drag shows include Afro-diasporic subjects dramatically imitating (and thereby critiquing) European thought and behavior, but they also feature gays donning hetero-drag to perform straight individuality, offering thus their critiques of other stigmatized individuals occupying contextually determined contradictory positionalities vis-à-vis oppression, such as heterosexual street thugs “of color”, at their dance battling balls. Therefore, in addition to race, class, and gender, we can also add sexually orientative identities to the constructed modalities upon which drag operates. Closeted gays can be said to be performing this kind of drag in almost every moment of their lives. Indeed, gender and sexuality researcher Lauren Levitt relates that, insofar as most everybody wants or expects to be accepted as a “real” iteration of a gender or ethnicity, “many writers” have made the case that “everyone essentially is in drag” [ibid].

This individual dons power drag by imaginatively dressing in the manner of “an American”–a social category which for centuries has been racialized to the exclusion of non-“white” populations.

A successful American business executive.

This individual’s drag reflects critical perfomativity of “the boy that probably robbed you a few minutes before you came to Paris’s ball.”

The objective of the drag performance is to exude a kind of authenticity the drag ball community dubbed “realness”, which gender and sexuality researcher Lauren Levitt defines as “the extent to which a performance conforms to the standard by which it is being judged”. When individuals strive for realness in the assumption of new racial identities, it is called racial “passing”.

This broader sense of the possibilities of drag which the film conveys leads us to the realization that Rachel Doležal does indeed engage in a form of drag. A great deal of the controversy surrounding Doležal arises then from those skeptical of her realness, or lack thereof. It has to be admitted though that Doležal did have a fair degree of success in being able to “pass” as Black, her position in the NAACP leadership seeming to add to her realness.

How well does Doležal conform to the abstracted, “standard”-ized notion of “a person of color”? How valid is it to hold individuals up to such standards?

Rachel Dolezal stands in a yard during autumn

Contesting ruling class recuperations

For what reason have the drag performances depicted in Paris is Burning been valorized by certain hegemonic forces within 21st century American society? It should be considered whether the decision taken in late 2016 by the U.S. government’s Library of Congress to “preserve and honor” the film, while appreciable, nevertheless signals a further step towards the recuperation of the revolutionary race and sex politics the film portrays (for example, in the Marxian, abolitionist attitude it conveys through its emphasis on the liberatory sociality of the drag ball “houses” as an alternative to the coercive sociality of the patriarchal, bourgeois standard of “the family”). This recuperation is mirrored in analogue developments such as the white engineering of African-American-led imperialism at the critical moment of burgeoning unrest at the tailend of the deeply unpopular, bank-bailing regime of George W. Bush, when the U.S. government donned transracial drag, using blackface to preserve its historical white power, as well as the sanctioning of gay-tolerant militarism achieved in 2011 via the repeal of the homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Thus while the generalized upward mobility of Modern Family-esque 21st century homosexual male individuality within U.S. society via developments such as the legalization of gay marriage, based on and enabled in large part by events orchestrated by groups such as the Gay Liberation Movement and other trailblazing radical LGBTQIA+ activists required cultural subversiveness–such as the identification with “Third World” Marxists (e.g. the Gay Liberation Front’s nomenclatural identification with the National Liberation Front, which at that time was engaged in bloody armed conflict with U.S. military forces in Vietnam), the recuperation and assimilation of the traces of this subversiveness by the same forces originally targeted for subversion by subalterns signals a hegemonic counteroffensive.

But a DOLEŽAL archetype poses startling questions for the social movements in general; what do we make of white, or “formerly white”, individuals finding 21st century socio-economic success–however extravagant or modest that “success” may be–in the appropriation of Transatlantic Afro-diasporic Black identity, in the dissimulation of WASP assimilation? And while Doležal made headway in becoming a civil rights activist, does her brand of transracialism not open up the way for presumably less well-intentioned, Justin Bieber-type appropriators who would inevitably adopt this Transatlantic Afro-diasporic Black identity, to monopolize culture-linked profit ventures opened up by the development of black and gay markets and sections of the bourgeoisie? (This trend could be–indeed, has been–analyzed with elder cultural icons, such as Elvis Presley, although many efforts have been made to highlight the fact that Elvis was a Romanichal, and thus “not white”.)

While transgenderism has existed in a variety of cultures, and for a long time, it has become one of the more contentious matters which divides the contemporary gay activist community itself, most noticeable nowadays perhaps when we cleave the latter at its intersection with the so-called “TERF” (or “Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminist”, a term which some argue constitutes a slur) community, comprising individuals who may or may not be of Lesbian persuasion. Let us return to the matter of so-called “TERFeminism” later on. For now, we can take notice of the fact that the gay community taking part in the balls of fin du 20ième siècle New York City was also not united in its understanding of what it meant, at that time, to be a drag queen.

The phrase “the gay community” has, by 2017, come to sound somewhat old-fashioned. During the years of the mid to late 2000s, high school Diversity Clubs and Gay-Straight Alliances, tended towards use of the acronym GLBT for “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender”, while in the 2010s the acronym LGBT has come to predominate over the former. We may suspect that this is a feminist victory because “gay” tends towards connotations of male homosexuality, and thus “gay movement” and “gay community” imply patriarchal forms, GLBT implying a gay-headed Lesbian movement. Meanwhile, the positionality of the letter T, at the end of the LGBT and GLBT acronyms shows its subordination, suggesting de-valuation of the transgender or “transsexual” community, which has long been known in part for its drag queens. Based on facts discernible in the film Paris is Burning (1990), many of the drag queens of ’80s NYC identified themselves as men who performed womanhood, and not as trans-women. An example of this is Pepper LaBeija, whose remarks in the film include: “Women get treated badly. You know, they get beat, they get robbed, they get dogged, so having the vagina, that doesn’t mean that you are going to have a fabulous life. It might in fact be worse.”

After watching Paris is Burning, my interest in learning more about the history of the U.S. gay community spiked as I recalled much of the hubbub which 21st century gay rights activism front groups for Marxist political organizations claim was roused out of the masses from the mere mention of the Stonewall Uprising, when homosexual members of the New York working classes were decisively victorious in staging a sort of insurrection due to social conflict between them, exploitative organized crime groups, and the harassive police forces. So it was around the same time that I viewed Paris is Burning that I watched another documentary film, also hosted by Youtube, that I had found about the Stonewall Uprising which occurred after an unlicensed, Mafia-rackateered gay bar called the Stonewall Inn was raided by oppressive, homophobic police. After that documentary was feasted upon by my eyes and ears, I saw a short video about five, or possibly ten, American gay riots which occurred before Stonewall, as far back as 1959, in California. From these sources, I gathered that the “gay bar” culture had really begun to spread during the 1960s. It occurred to me that, in a way, the gay bars replaced the speakeasies of the 1930s, being illegal drinking establishments which were sometimes owned by the mob. But there do exist those aficionados of the “gay bar” scene who may eschew the “homosexual lifestyle” itself, if we consider patterns of sexual relations between organisms constitutive of a lifestyle. One may also wonder about the sexuality of Italian mobsters who visited the Stonewall gay bar, if only to collect their dues. But I do question the value and legitimacy of the discourse of those individuals who advocate supporting the identity label “Queer” as a meeting point between the LGBT community and the LGBT community’s “weird” friends and then in retrospect perhaps do support the value and legitimacy of this notion, because I believe that one can, and indeed many do, frequent gay bars without necessarily having a true sentimental connaissance of homosexual desire, and therefore be identified, by some in the society in which that individual lives, as “straight”, but not the kind of “straight” that’s chill with gay bars–therefore becoming “Queer” in a way, due to proximity in the social movements historically associated with “homosexuality”, “bisexuality”, and “transsexuality”.

Trans- affinities

It had come to my attention that some of the drag queens in the film Paris is Burning were white-passing, due to the fact that in the comments section of Youtube, where Paris is Burning is hosted and available for viewing, a comment left by some forlorn internaut could be found identifying Dorian Corey, a drag queen, by the epitaph “the white drag queen”.

In this still from Paris is Burning, we see Dorian Corey, who laments, “Unfortunately, I didn’t know that I really wanted to look like Lena Horne. When I grew, of course you know, Black stars were stigmatized. Nobody wanted to look like Lena Horne. Everybody wanted to look like Marilyn Monroe.”

Thereafter, another commenter chimed in, chiding the writer of the previous comment and asserting that Dorian Corey was African-American or Black. I’m not sure which ethnonym that commenter asserted to be applicable to Corey; perhaps they did not even identify one ethnonym or the other, but simply stated that Dorian Corey was, in fact, “not white”.

In the case of these individuals such as Dorian Corey and other lighter skinned, blue eyed “Negros” called (e.g. Walter Francis) White, it is thought that they are Black because of the One Drop Rule, which states that though they may in actuality be mainly European of ancestral extraction, they are in actuality BLACK due to the “predominance” of black blood over white blood. Frances Cress Welsing took this a step further, establishing the notion of whiteness as a genetically recessive phenomenon in her groundbreaking Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation, formalizing the pseudoscientific One Drop Rule from the standpoint of Critical Race Theory.

Above: The original Walter White, a prominent African-American leader in the same organization as Rachel Doležal, before his name was culturally misappropriated by the father-figure actor from the American sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle” in an early 21st century prestige television program about methamphetamine.

Frances Cress Welsing was a successful psychoanalyst who, alongside other luminaries who brought forth the discourse of Afrocentricity during the 1970s and 1980s, mastered the craft of psychoanalytic, and some would argue, “pseudoscientific” racial theorizing.

Frances Cress Welsing

Though aspects of Cress Welsing’s multi-decade oeuvre could possibly be subjected to a number of sound criticisms, more deserving of recognition and attention here is one of her final nuggets of wisdom. I refer here to her astounding analytic insight into the twisted psyche of Dylan Storm Roof, the White Southerner currently on death row for having perpetrated on June 17, 2015 the massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which he ended the lives of nine innocent individuals for no reason other than his white power delusion (though we must be careful not to excuse or downgrade the responsibility/despicability of white power political extremist thinking and organizing with psychopathological terminology such as “delusion”). Shortly before her death on January 2, 2016, Cress Welsing illustrated clearly with her elegant, prosaic speech that Dylan Storm Roof had a racialized sexual fetish, perhaps based in a violence-prone complex of racialized sexual inferiority, which was expressed with the symbolic re-presentation of his phallus as a large black pistol, playing up the racial stereotypes.

Above: In this photo we see the soon-to-be lethally injected Storm Roof placing a firearm in an arguably sexually suggestive location in relation to his body, dangling it between his legs, and surrounding himself with potted flowers. Sigmund Freud advises that we should not forget that flowers are in fact the genitals of plants. Notice how the black pistol forms a graphic connection between the reproductive organs of the non-human life forms and those of Storm Roof. This racialized sexual transference–the replacement of the white penis with the black phallic object–stands as further evidence of the intersectionality of transgenderism and transracialism. Although Storm Roof’s phallic substitution does not constitute transgenderism (the pistol being a male gendered, penile object), it is transsexually transracial.

The attentive viewer of Paris is Burning will observe the interesectionality of transracialism and transgenderism, which is particularly striking in personages such as Dorian Corey (though not only). The film evidences a certain affinity between the phenomenon of gender-transitioning and that of “Negro” to “white-passing” (to “white”) transgenerational transracialism–a historical process occurring among many individuals who also happened to share an interest in transitioning themselves from being “men” into being “women”, whether permanently in day-to-day life or temporarily in the ritualized context of the balls.

The academic who prefers not to capitalize the first letters of her pen name, bell hooks, identifies the project of the drag queens depicted in Paris is Burning as simultaneously transgenderist and transracialist in “Is Paris Burning?”, a chapter in her 1996 book Reel to Real: Race Sex, and Class at the Movies:

Within the world of the black gay drag ball culture she [Livingston] depicts, the idea of womanness and femininity is totally personified by whiteness. What viewers witness is not black men longing to impersonate or even to become like “real” black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized vision of femininity that is white. Called out in the film by Dorian Carey [sic], who names it by saying no black drag queen of his day wanted to be Lena Horne, he makes it clear that the femininity most sought after, most adored, was that perceived to be the exclusive property of white womanhood.

But let us consider why, on the most basic level, this affinity exists.

As evidenced by their common prefix, it can be remarked that transgender and transracial peoples are fundamentally alike for one essential reason: they are in transition. One transitions from a gender; the other, from a race. Like drag performers, they also commit what is viewed as transgression by transcending the limitations socially imposed on their assigned identity.

There are some significant differences between the phenomena of gender and race transitioning. One is that the gender transition takes place within the course of a lifetime, affecting primarily the individual, while the racial transition described here is transgenerational, affecting collectivities such as clans and family units, as in the fictional examples of Peola or Neil Kingsblood.

Transgenerational transracialism is the story of coercive assimilation to white supremacist society, which explains why more members of the Afro-diasporic population in the U.S. now identify, or perhaps are identified by others, as “white” than as “black”. That is to say that, despite both the One Drop Rule and Cress Welsing’s notion of white genetic recessivity, so-called “interracial” sexual-reproductive relations (or “miscegenation”) have in fact caused more individuals among the U.S. population which is of varying degrees of mixed European and African ancestry to be identified as “white” (or “passing”?) than as Black. This is made possible by the white supremacist drive of bourgeois anti-culture, which also introduces “colorism” into the heart of the Black community. It seems more of a question of cultural assimilation than a would-be problem of “genetic drift”; the hegemonic white patrons of Western colonialism seemed to catch on symbolically, with many more Littles and Clays than Xs and Alis coming to predominate over the Afro-diasporic populace. However, this white supremacist push to transgenerationally assimilate “minorities” cannot be resolved with a superficial change in the way of thinking about racial identity, such as by merely instructing these white-passing, distantly Afro-diasporic masses to accept themselves as “genuinely” Black due to their existence being the direct result of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. That’s why it is also important to render cultural practices such as aesthetic skin bleaching taboo, and to diminish sentiments of racial fetishization of whiteness as a desired sex characteristic by giving due value and implementation to notions such as black pride and beautifulness. Only then will the current historically-based form of Transatlantic Racialized Slave and Master Social Classes discrimination be overcome. The hard cores (aka nucleos duros or asilis) of each national, or ethno-cultural, archetype will survive for some time in a mosaic fashion within the united global world economy, even as this develops into an environment of total cultural egalitarianism. What “white people” have to understand is that whiteness is not so much an ethno-cultural expression, but a tool of capitalist coercion which censors such expressions.

Some leftist writers implicitly suggest that Karl Marx himself was “transrace”. In “On the Social Ontology of ‘Race’ — Was Karl Marx White? And Is He?” Steve Darcy at The Public Autonomy Project essentially argues that, given 19th century Europe’s racial othering of Ashkenazic Jewry, Marx was perceived as racially “Other” in his day, but given the near-consensus among 21st century individuals that Ashkenazic Jewry is encapsulated by “whiteness”, Marx has therefore become a transracial subject, having been non-white during his own lifetime while nevertheless being now (rightly?) considered a “dead white male”. I would, however, contest the notion that Marx’s epitaph should read “dead white male”, any more than Dorian Corey’s ought to, because if we accept the previous half of this argument (i.e., that Marx was perceived as racially “other” during the 19th century, considered as something analogous to what might today be called “a person of color”), then he should still be understood, as a historical personage, with that fact in mind. The matter is further complicated by the fact that Karl Marx was perhaps of African descent, his family having called him by the nickname “the Moor” due to “his dark complexion”.

Drawing of a young Karl Marx, whose nickname “the Moor” is said to have reflected his physiognomy.

Darcy’s consideration of Karl Marx as transrace is analogous to the way in which drag queens such as Dorian Coreymay be perceived by ignorant early 21st century viewers of Paris is Burning as belonging to another “race” than the one with which they were identified by populaces of late 20th century New York (or by more knowledgeable individuals of our time who are aware of the historico-cultural context in which the film’s personages lived). In this perspective, it is clear that transracialism exhibits a high degree of contingency upon historico-contextualization. Ironically, the Youtube commenter who thought Dorian Corey was a white person, seemed to somehow discount the very point Corey tries to make in the film about the other drag queens identifying more with the white Marilyn Monroe than the black Lena Horne. Corey seemed to view the transracial aspect of the drag queens’ aspiration as pathological. Corey informs us that, “In a ballroom you can be anything you want”, but signals disdainfulness for the fact that most wanted to be white. This white supremacist drive has other bizarre manifestations, such as a whole sub-genre of hypnotic videos, also available on Youtube, featuring low-frequency and binaural sounds to help individuals “get pale white skin”(trigger warning: deeply unsettling).

Let’s return now briefly to the previously mentioned issue of the divide which exists among and/or between the members and supporters of LGBTQIA+ communities and a certain type of women’s movement activist labelled, usually by critics of this line, as the “trans-exclusive radical feminist”.

An interesting selection of facts begins to emerge when we cross-analyze LGBTQIA+ discourses and so-called “TERF” discourses, along with those of another group often allied with the latter, the “SWERF” (or, “Sex Workers Exclusive Radical Feminists”, another term which those to whom it is applied often deride as a stigmatic exonym, similar perhaps to calling advocates of reproductive rights “anti-life” instead of “pro-choice”). It appears that while transphobia can and does exist among homophiles, it is less likely, although not impossible, for homophobia to exist among transphiles. It is, on the other hand, still quite possible that misogyny exists among transphilic homophiles. We get this sense of homophilic transphobia a bit in Paris is Burning, when some of the gay drag queens vehemently dispute the notion that they would become “girls” or “women”. In this light, the ’80s NYC gay community involved in the ball and voguing scene might be seen as sexually fueling the capitalist sex trafficking trade, because these transgender and gay male drag queens served to increase the liberation of individuals from the sex economic repression of the moral mainstream of society, which in turn liberalized and enhanced the sexual marketplace, the figure of the trans-woman scarcely separable from the trans-woman-philic straight male sex commodifier, whom members of the heteronormative society deride as homosexual, not accepting the trans-woman as a “real” woman, whom the “TER” feminists chastise for re-inforcing gender roles as opposed to transcending them.

The TERF and SWERF critique of “transgender-ism” thus replicates the critique of certain social justice advocates against Rachel Doležal’s brand of “transracialism”; if the goal is to abolish gender, then the goal is surely to abolish race as well. This proposes a bit of a problem however because we could anticipate that different tensions might arise from the proposal to mold all of the world’s peoples into some pan-human descendent kin. If we take the Noel Ignatievian notion of “racial abolitionism” at face value, that we must “abolish the white race”, there is a real tension between, on the one hand, the idea that this racial abolitionism is largely metaphorical, and that by superficially changing our ways of thinking and behaving, we remove our socially constructed racial identifications although the pan-human descendants will continue to display a range of physiognomies relatively similar to that which exists now, and on the other hand, the idea that privileged sections of “First World” populaces will need to be deported en masse to more egalitarian environments in the so-called “Global South”, where the formerly privileged are likely to perceive egalitarianism as social subordination until the consciousness of their descendants has been altered to fully accept the abolition of white supremacy. If we accept the One-Drop Rule-esque Color-Confrontation Theory of Frances Cress Welsing, then we must admit that the transition of humanity’s descendants to a pan-human kinship will preserve human blackness while eradicating whiteness. The premise of this proposition (that the abolition of racism, combined with white genetic recessivity, results in the abolition of an oppressive social construct disguised as an ethno-cultural group known as “white people” but not in the abolition of “black people”) should perhaps be reconsidered, because it forms the entire basis of anti-miscegenationist hysteria and the neo-Nazi ethos.

The “Homosexuality” of White Supremacist Thought and Behavior

A bitter irony of the white supremacist (also known as “America First-ist”) and/or neo-Nazi worldview is that Nazism, or white racism in general, is actually fundamentally premised on Homosexuality. I know this is a startling claim, but I will explain why this is so in the text which follows.

Nazism creates the sexual fetish of race, proclaiming the Aryan-on-Aryan action needed to create a HOMO-genous racial community, a volk based on the HOMO-sexual love which one Aryan man feels for one Aryan woman, and vice versa. Now that we have established Nazism as a sort of homosexual ideology, we can also observe that it nevertheless incorporates heterosexuality on the gender plane of desire. This contradiction is possible because semi-autonomous planes of sexual desire rely on many basic features of the human body and identity which can be exploited for the Twoness principle: masculinity, femininity, blackness, whiteness. The only difference between the gender and racial planes of sexual desire though is that, gender being historically and culturally linked to sex (and until the emergence of gender theory, essentially synonymous), gender preference in sexual orientation cannot be rightly considered a “fetish”, while sexual orientations axed around preferences with regard to the race or ethnicity of potential sexual partners are fetishistic, because ethnicity is not an intrinsically sexual feature, or at least not linked to sex in the same way as gender. Nevertheless, the reproduction of racial identity groupings (e.g. “white people”) relies on sexual reproduction, so the anti-miscegenationist, the white supremacist, nationalist, neo-Nazi, or “alt rightist” sexualizes white skin and other physical features associated with pseudoscientific “white” racial identity, turning these features into sex characteristics. The emergence of the term “cuckservative” or “cuck” as a neo-Nazi or alt-right insult for rival white nationalists (or rather, conservative U.S. nationalists/American patriots who just so happen to be white, such as Jeb Bush, for example) who do not embrace anti-miscegenationism, which “[alludes] to a genre of porn in which passive white husbands watch their wives have sex with black men” also demonstrates the sexually fetishistic nature of this ideology’s fixations.

Culturally, an important divide within the right-wing white people community exists between advocates of Christian identity, who believe that “white people” are “a lost tribe of Israel”, and those such as Augustus Sol Invictus, Varg Vikernes, etc. who reject “Judaeo-Christianity”, embracing instead efforts to construct a new Eurocentric pseudo-spirituality by appropriating aspects of the pagan mythologies of pre-Christian Europe, sometimes combined with Satanism–(there are also those such as Michael Aquino and Richard Spencer who do the same thing but, in an even more blatantly culturally misappropriative manner, construct their Eurocentric pseudo-spiritualities around African, namely Kemetic, mythology [See: “Temple of Set” and “Cult of Kek”]). This can be quite revealing about the racially fetishistic homosexual nature of white supremacists, because the ancient peoples of the arbitrarily delineated landmass known today as “Europe” were known for valorizing homosexual relations. In Plato’s Symposium (circa 380 BC), the Ancient Greek man Pausanias, known for being the lover of the male poet Agathon, distinguishes between two forms of love.

Pausanias maintained that there exist:

(1) Common Love, or Popular Love, which occurs between a man and a woman, and

(2) Celestial Love, which is homosexual and exclusively male.

In Ancient Greek culture, the hegemonic belief was that men were superior to women, and therefore the homosexual love between two superior, male beings was superior to, and spiritually more powerful than heterosexual love, occurring between a superior and an inferior being (i.e. a man and a woman). Nazism inherits this same paradigm, sublimating only one minor aspect of it (transferring the operation from the gender plane of sexual attraction to the racial plane of sexual fetishism), in considering racially homosexual unions of white couples superior to the racially heterosexual unions between members of the so-called “master race” and the supposedly “inferior races”. In the modern iteration, this form of homosexuality is encouraged through the policies of white supremacist leaders such as Obama, who deported more foreigners from the United States than any other president, and Trump, whose recent short-lived ban on millions of racially “othered” foreigners from the possibility of entering the United States served to reinforce diminution of the chances that the insular people of the Fortress-like white supremacist state will encounter “inferior” peoples and procreate with them.

Another indication of late-stage Nazism’s indebtedness to the supremacist ideal of Celestial Love is hinted at in the former’s advocacy of transracialism. The neo-Nazi David Myatt, founder and predominant theorist of the eugenics-cum-human sacrifice advocating Satanic cult called “the Order of Nine Angles”–analysed in my treatise “What is Net-Centric Warfare?”–calls for the transformation of Homo sapiens into something he dubs “Homo Galactica”, a so-called “master race”. Like Pausanias’ Celestial Love, Myatt’s Homo Galactica advocates supremacist unions and alludes to outer space, suggesting a “heavenly” outcome for those who engage the superior sexual practice. Only the gender supremacist aspect of “Celestial Love” has been swapped for racial supremacism in the “Homo Galactica” master race fantasy.

The appearance of homophobia among white supremacists is a point of tension, and perhaps an Achilles’ heel to their ideology, because, like the white-passing characters in Kingsblood Royal and Imitation of Life, the exposition of the homosexual genesis of their doctrine may inspire terror in the neo-Nazi psyche, threatening to bring it shame and embarrassment. The fascist repression of homosexuality expressed through homophobia and anti-LGBT bigotry has traditionally been, in the final analysis, deemed necessary in order to sublimate the drive of “standard” homosexuality (especially male-on-male “Celestial Love”) into the racial (white-on-white) homosexuality required for the fulfillment of the “Fourteen Words” (i.e., the neo-Nazi ethos). In this case (in which the fulfillment of modern Christian white racial homosexuality is predicated upon the sublimation of ancient pagan gender homosexuality), the elimination of the homophilia taboo from the gender plane of desire may erode in part the basis for coercing individuals into compliance with the white supremacist value of homophilia on the racial plane of desire.

On the other hand, the recent attempt by sections of the far-right to give neo-Nazism a facelift not only by rebranding it as the “alt-right”, but also taking a slight step back from machismo and “traditional” heterosexual masculinity (e.g. confluence of the alt-right with so-called “beta” masculinity, or the emergence of misogynistic, anti-feminist “men’s rights activist [MRA]” gay men) is revealing of a rapprochement between neo-Nazism and homosexuality, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by many of those who have begun to study this iteration of “information age” neo-Nazism. The attempt of sections of the alt-right to revive the ancient principle of male supremacist “Celestial Love” is another instance of recuperation and fascist subversion, capitalizing on advances made by the Left in the sphere of gay rights to serve oppression by attempting to force a realignment of gay men to stand on the side of the oppressors, in the U.S. military and corporate world, alongside adherents of white male bourgeois supremacy. Still, “traditional” white supremacy’s basis in racial homosexuality can easily lead white supremacists of the more “traditional” (anti-gay) variety to slip into practices which would be perceived as “homosexual” in the common understanding of that term. In that regard, the instauration of a “Celestial Love”-grounded white male supremacist movement, whose embryo can be located within the emergent neo-Nazi alt-right is a natural ideological development, making sense from the standpoint of dialectical materialism. This happens because the fetishistic sexualization of white skin, a non-sex trait which has been transformed into a sex trait within the white supremacist ideological framework, leads the white nationalist to be constantly in search of desirable sex characteristics in potential brethren with whom he seeks to form reactionary political movements to ensure the continued sexual reproduction of the so-called “white race”. The singular devotion to the ideal of whiteness, combined with the de-valuation of feminism common in white supremacist circles, leads the male neo-Nazis to view whiteness tout court as the primary object of desire, a sex characteristic of unmatched importance.

Although it is true that the most vehement producers of homophobic discourses almost always simultaneously grapple with the repression of their own latent homosexual desire, it would be incredibly misguided to invoke the openly racially homosexual and consequently latently gay nature of white supremacists to augment homophobic discourse by trying to dress up anti-LGBT bigotry as antifascist. Our praxis must incorporate the consideration that within the fascist camp there exist two antagonistic premises, which must both be combatted: the homophobia which racially homosexual Nazism has traditionally favored (seen for example in the fact that gays were also victimized by the Holocaust) as well as the misogynistic gender homophilia of the pre-Christian Europeans (e.g. Pausanias) to which the modern Eurocentric, racially sex homophilic ideology is indebted and reconciling with.

A tragic setback for gay liberation occurred in the early part of the 20th century in part because of the confusion aroused by Nazism’s reconciliation–then in its infancy–with the male supremacist homosexuality valorized by pre-Christian Europeans. The nascent Soviet Union had already begun establishing gay rights at this time, but the homosexual militarism of Ernst Röhm, Hitler’s closest friend and a gay man, and many of the Nazis at the highest echelons of the political hierarchy of 1930s Germany, provided ample fodder for homophobes to slander the gay community of the young Soviet Union as fascist sympathizers, inhibiting thus progress in lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and questioning spheres as well. This setback for the social and sexual revolution under the Bolsheviks stands as ample evidence of the deterioration of the quality of the revolutionary vanguard hegemony within the Communist political party under the homophobic leadership of Joseph Stalin, who directed many politically and ideologically illiterate people to enroll as members of what was meant to be the most advanced segment of the populace in terms of social woke-ness, the Communist Party.

Conclusions

Transgender and transrace individuals both must deal with similar emotions. Shame and terror are key among these. Transrace characters like Sinclair Lewis’s Neil Kingsblood and Fannie Hurst’s Peola on the one hand are terrorized by the fear of being made to feel disgrace and shame through having their identification with a stigmatized racial grouping exposed, while transrace individuals like Rachel Doležal perhaps feel similar emotions in being exposed as identifying with Black culture despite lack of Transatlantic Afro-diasporic ancestry. It hardly needs to be said why transgender individuals are also terrorized, given these transphobic societies we live in, which double terrorization for trans people of color, such as the unjustly incarcerated CeCe McDonald.

In terms of trans-modernity, the neo-fin de siècle society depicted in Paris is Burning seems to sit at an interesting threshold. In a way, late 20th century New York was like The Matrix, waiting to be “red-pilled” by–you guessed it–“Nine / Eleven”! After 9/11, everything changed. Mechanized police forces began to pummel the alter-globalizationists with lacrimogen–oh no–wait, they did that before 9/11… Ah well, 9/11 accelerated shit, allowing CIA director Bush’s son to enact some slick new imperial machinations. Similarly, while trans-modernity emphasizes the notion that we really shouldn’t get too carried away with trying to pinpoint the location of a postmodern rupture with modernity, the trans- affinities the film highlights do nevertheless resonate in an uncanny way on any historical timeline that might be constructed with them in mind. Transmodernity is suggestive of a process moving beyond modernity in a way that the notion of postmodernism falsely locates in the past. Similarly, transgenderism and transracialism suggest processes, not necessarily of transitioning from one race or one gender into another, but of moving beyond binary traps. Transracialism and transgenderism need not be predicated upon the maintenance of gendered and racialized core “types”, such as the “African” and the “European” or the “gentleman” and the “lady”.

If we apply the same bifurcating logic which premises transraciality and transgenderism to the title of Livingston’s documentaryitself, its complement must be that Kinshasa is Cool, because Kinshasa is the second most populated city of the French-speaking world.These form thus the yin and yang of La Francophonie. The Eurocentricity of this equation, erasing the presence of Lingala and other indigenous Congolese tongues, resonates with the tendency which certain critics of the transracialism and transgenderism depicted in Paris is Burning (such as bell hooks) claim exists for these to be too soft on white supremacy and patriarchy abolitionism, being happy to simply gain privilege and power by transitioning from black to white, from sad and destitute poor gay boy to spoiled rich straight girl. The resonance of Paris is Burning is felt in the late period with musical hits like “Ni**as in Paris” by Jay Z and Kanye West. The city of Paris seems to evoke in the Western, American mind in some ways a liberatory and also aristocratic lifeway, with sexualized and racialized as well as Orientalist aspects, as in the lyrics of one of the most common variants of “The Streets of Cairo” (i.e., “There’s a place in France, where the naked ladies dance”).

The question of transraciality also arises in the Rromani community with regard to the relationship between groups of Rromani individuals contrastively characterized as Kashtalo and Pakivalo by some Rroma, such as blogger Cîrpaci Marian Nuțu, who describes this relationship in terms evocative of antagonism or parasitism. This could be an interesting starting point for another comparative analysis, given the similarities in the development of racism in slave societies during early capitalist modernity on both sides of the Atlantic. Whereas the systematic enslavement of Rroma had already taken root in the Ottoman-dominated provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia (which formed the basis of the modern Romanian state) during the pre-Columbian period, the formation of the Black Atlantic identity was several centuries retarded in comparison to that of Rromani identity, giving Rromani identity more time to be attacked with racialist goals of diffusion and dissipation. These efforts to eradicate Rromani identity are the source of the name Kashtalo (meaning “wooden” in Rromanes [the Rromani language]) in reference to persons of Rromani ethnicity who do not have knowledge of the Rromani language. During the period of enslavement, Rromani castes were often delineated occupationally, with wood-working Rroma being one caste which stopped speaking Rromanes, so the Pakivale rroms, who did manage to keep speaking Rromanes, are regarded by some as more “authentic” Rroma than the Kashtale, whose transraciality pushes them to the verge, if not past the point, of becoming gadze (non-Rroma). Cîrpaci, the previously cited blogger, accuses Rromani NGO’s of underrepresenting the Pakivale, and overrepresenting the Kashtale, whom he insinuates exercise a deceptive degree of fluidity when it comes to either dissimulating or owning up to Rromani or “Gypsy/tsigan” identity based on convenience.

Future social and political movements are likely to necessarily be inclusive of individuals whose subjectivities are shaped by a variety of trans* processes operating in the realms not only of sexuality and gender, but also intergenerational and transgenerational ones operating in the sphere of ethnic or racial belonging, while in the same time providing space for a variety of perspectives informed by both critical race theory and gender critical theory, including those critical of the kind of “transracialism” exemplified by the case of Rachel Doležal, which is not a transgenerational phenomenon but occurs within the lifetime of an individual. Just as the transformation of one thing into another, like Marxian dialectics, requires room for contradiction, so too should social movements be big enough to, in their unity, house contradictions. The goal of the political left is to usher in the demise of capitalist wage slavery and imperialist oppression via solidarity among individuals, to transit the final phases of modernity, and we begin to think forward to our collective transcendence into a communist civilization whose quality is quintessentially postmodern. Meanwhile, in this transmodern era of socialism we remain haunted by the outputs of modernity which live and die all around us in the same time.

ALL WORKS CITED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PRINCIPLE OF FAIR USE.

**Update, 17 September 2017** : After publishing this article, I received both positive and negative feedback from persons in online spaces dedicated to both transgender as well as gender critical or “trans critical” communities. Some in the former were averse to so much as entertaining the thought of a trans*-informed analysis of Rachel Doležal, while some in the latter did not appreciate that, despite having used scare-quotes to signal a degree of skepticism when introducing the term, I referenced a discourse as being known as “trans exclusive” or “TERF”. I have edited the text to better reflect that, not unlike the use of “trans cult” to describe trans* activism and culture, this term is understood by many of those to whom it is applied to constitute a term of abuse, in addition to clarifying a couple of thoughts in the conclusion of this piece.

The following is an insightful piece by Jehu of “The Real Movement” blog on why “anti-globalism” is fascist bullshit and misguided “anti-globalism” advocated by Leftists enables fascist bullshit. The latter form of anti-globalism is expressed in phenomena such as Russophilic “anti-imperialism” and Bernie Sanders’ phony “democratic [national] socialism”, which I criticized in pieces such as “Sanders is a fraud and not real socialism” and “Together with Russia?”

Donald Trump is the ultimate refutation of Lexit politics advocated on the Left and they will come to rue ever promoting the idea. Broadly defined, Lexit is a theory you can improve the conditions of the working class of a country by erecting barriers to the world market. No one has ever demonstrated why this […]

Esteemed 21st Century Proletarian Literature followers and passersby,

As you may have already noticed from recent updates to my website, the 21st century proletarian novel Raving Radicals Bathed in Blax is now on sale.

The publication of Raving Radicals represents the culmination of a long and arduous process.

I began writing Raving Radicals over three years ago, in the summer of 2013. Many significant changes took place in my life since then. I left my precarious job as a low-income airport worker and took what I could say is perhaps a more culturally productive job halfway around the world, encountering many interesting strangers here, some of whom have even become my family members. Although the nature of employment in the Second World has lowered my income in real terms, it has allowed me to leave behind the cesspool of ultra-reactionary settler descendants which is the USA, which I am thankful for. Even though much of my family is indigenous to the Americas, I think avant-garde decolonizers should seriously consider voluntarily evacuating the occupied lands of North America. It is a patronizing self-entitlement settler mindset of the white Leftist which says that it is somehow more courageous to continue to reap the benefits of genocidal papal bull-based land theft than to go away, or at least take a long hiatus (and not in Canada!). There were plenty of days and weeks when I felt blocked and inspiration deficient, and when it came time for proofreading and editing, some serious flemme onset began when I realized that I was working with what must be the most glitchy word-processing program ever. Eventually though, it was over. While the publication of Raving Radicals represents the end of one process, it is also the beginning of another: that of 21st Century Proletarian Literature revitalization.

RavingRadicals Bathed in Blax will be fundamentally dissimilar to anything you have ever read before.

Raving Radicals is a satirical geopolitical thriller and a transmo proletarian novel. It is like an inverted Red Dawn; that’s why its working title was Red Twilight. I feel that there are two essential literary sources of inspiration behind Raving Radicals Bathed inBlax, though there may be others of secondary importance. One was Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction à la littérature fantastique; I was fascinated by the notion of the fantastique, which I believe captures the revolutionary spirit of these apparently “pre-revolutionary” times we live in more closely than either the merveilleux or l’étrange, because we constantly face the tension between feasibility and infeasibility. The revolutionary overhaul of society is a strange outcome-prediction in that it will seem inevitable, understandable by the common framework of understanding once it has become a past event, but proletarian literature must be fantastic–not strange–because Marxian science is by its nature flirtatious with impossiblity: bourgeois ideas rule, and are therefore socially imbued with feasibility, while proletarian and subaltern ideas are construed as infeasible, impossible. The second literary source which I would acknowledge as impactful upon the production of Raving Radicals Bathed in Blax was Marimba Ani’s Yurugu: An Afro-centric Critique of European Thought and Behavior and its insistence upon the consciousness-altering hormone. I also harnessed fantastic, strange, and marvelous bits and pieces of the histories of myself and my ancestors. I should also acknowledge and thank the members of Red Shadow, the economics rock ‘n’ roll band, who gave me permission to reproduce the lyrics to their song Get Your Ass with the Class in a scene in which the radical Santa Muerte-worshipping revolutionary protagonists play communist music like Red Shadow, Sun Rise Above, and 240 Bravo to de-program to captured agents of the Homeland Intelligence Agency.

The recent fire and mass casualty in Oakland, California comes as a timely and macabre reminder of the necessity of socialist revolution. It comes just over one year and one month after a similar fire in Bucharest which killed 64 persons, in a similar space.

Raving Radicals seemed to anticipate these tragedies in a way, because Raving Radicals begins with a group of young activists who go to a warehouse rave where a mass casualty incident occurs. Mass casualty incidents are tragically often the inciting incidents of our modern stories. In Raving Radicals, the partygoers are not killed by fire, but by a stampede triggered by a police raid. Because Raving Radicals is satirical, much of its action is over the top. However, given that the conditions of capitalism push people, especially young people, into precarious situations, we can consider that fires caused by bourgeois negligence are not unlike a stampede caused by maximum voltage taser-happy pigs.

If you do decide to read Raving Radicals Bathed in Blax, please consider purchasing it from:

On “innovative” imperialism and the farce of American democratic republicanism

By Daniel K. Buntovnik, 6 November 2016

This piece addresses dilemmas facing opponents of war and imperialism in the 2016 U.S. presidential race, the future of war-profiteering, eumemicist racism, the “alt-right” rehashing of neo-Nazi occultism, and Net-Centric Warfare as black magic.

Note: The U.S. presidential campaign season will have come to an end soon, but the general dynamics of the two-party system discussed under the first subheading of this analysis are unlikely to disappear in 2020.

The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and the Anti-War Citizen

Although the ruling class of the United States of America bends over backwards to display its cleavage into so-called “Republican” and “Democratic” factions, this apparent split is, to a significant degree, exaggerated. Every day, conscious and unconscious agents of plutocratic, oligarchical dictatorship are working hard to drum up minor differences between the political parties of the bourgeoisie. This encourages us to spend a disproportionate amount of our time focusing on the disagreements between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and their parties, disengaging from the reality of their joint pursual of key political objectives.

The deeper the illusion of Democratic-Republican cleavage is driven into the citizenry’s consciousness, the more the popularity contest in which the masses are quadrennially enticed to (indirectly) participate is lent legitimacy. The suggestion that this contest represents a real opportunity to take part in the national policy-making process is enhanced by the impression of cleavage, while elevated awareness of bipartisan fusion and unity across the bourgeois political spectrum threatens to foment disenchantment and revolt, because it leads to the conclusion that American elections offers little in the way of actual choice.

The scope of the great false dilemma goes beyond what is commonly understood by the term “two-party system”. This is because U.S. presidential electoral politics have, in the 21st century, actually developed into a four-party system, composed of two “Big League” parties and two “Little League” parties. The Little League parties, by virtue of each one functioning as a fallback or an auxiliary to its Big League counterpart, serve as a farcical opposition force to what is generally understood by the term “two-party system” (i.e. the two Big League parties). Presently the Little League two-party system is composed of (1) the Green Party, absorbing disaffected ex-Democrats such as Jill Stein and the Gaddafist Cynthia McKinney as well as syphoning off resources from opportunistic Marxian micro-sects, and (2) the Libertarian Party, absorbing disaffected ex-Republicans such as Gary Johnson and Ron Paul (in whose case we see the revolving door between “Libertarians” and the GOP). Other “third parties” are relegated to competing with each other as well as with the Greens and Libertarians to gain access to the Little League two-party system.

Both the Libertarian and Green parties attempt to harness the storm of anti-war sentiment, but fail to adequately address imperialist war as an integral function of the capitalist system. Both pledge to put an end to what Gary Johnson calls the “imperialistic foreign policy” of the U.S.A., which Jill Stein says is “turning our republic into a bankrupt empire”. Notice how for these peewee politicians, U.S. foreign policy is not imperialist, but imperialistic—implying that it merely resembles imperialism; and nevermind the multi-century policy of invading and annexing foreign nations—half of Mexico, Hawaii, the Philippines, just to name a few—this doesn’t have anything to do with why the U.S.A. is a wealthy country today; the wars and drone attacks of the 21st century are only in the process of transforming the country into a “bankrupt” empire… but we’re not there yet! The Little League political players qualify their anti-imperialist posturing with significant caveats; the figurative fine print of Johnson’s program lets us know that he still wants “to build a strong military”, and Stein meanwhile pledges to continue spending as much as $298.5 billion per year on public sector U.S. militarism. That’s still $83 billion more than the country with the second highest military budget in the world, the People’s Republic of China [X].

Some attempt to paint an image of the Green Party as an attractive political center for revolutionary socialism and peace, but the Green Party and its micro-sect surrogates are oriented towards accommodating right-wing nationalist theory. Their objective is to co-opt supporters of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic “socialist” ex-competitor, Bernie Sanders, whose campaign’s central theme was about “saving capitalism for the many, not the few” with a national “political revolution”, the very notion of which stands in antagonistic contradiction to the act of abolishing capitalism through transnational social revolution (for a variety of reasons, some of which I explored here). Rather than criticizing the “trustbuster” thrust of Robert Reich inspired slogans like “political revolution against the billionaire class”, the Greens and their surrogates facilitate assimilation of the fantasy implicit in these slogans, that of a salvageable capitalism based around restored small business competitivity and regulation—not expropriation—of the big corporations (labelled “democratic socialism”), along with continued deportations and borders, a fantasy which is rendered explicit upon closer examination of the discourse of individuals like Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, and Robert Reich.

If Jill Stein, the theoretically electable candidate in this year’s Electoral College with the most far-reaching proposals for U.S. militarism reduction, became the president of the United States and implemented her reforms, the U.S. war machine would likely be slightly weaker than it is now (although it would probably remain quite powerful, given Jill Stein’s pledge to provide it with an approximate yearly budget surpassing that of any other nation), but this would only be worthwhile if in the process of implementing these reforms, awareness of the need to ultimately abolish the basis of war (capitalism and hegemony of the bourgeois state) grew and the movement centered around this awareness became stronger. Otherwise the next president could simply reverse the course, and it’s not inconceivable that the Pentagon would find some sly way to circumvent those hypothetical budget cuts or perhaps even orchestrate a coup. However, given that Stein has virtually no chance to become president, why should anyone lend support to “anti-war” individuals and groups who do not plainly articulate abolition of capitalism—the precluder of peace in modern times—through social revolution as their ultimate goal? Are we really so cynical to believe that people are too stupid to understand the basic demands of socialism? Tax the rich, sure, but don’t become a stooge of the rich—plenty of them ultimately wouldn’t mind paying higher taxes if it meant saving even a bit of their privilege. The would-be revolutionary’s entryistic support, even if “critical”, for the reformist political center degenerates into de facto agitation for reformism, promoting non-abolitionist consciousness, which cannot be reconciled with abolitionist consciousness. The anti-war movement would be stronger—would exist—if it was centered around the objective of ending the basis of war, not around the idealistic embrace of leaders like Jill Stein, who vows to maintain the U.S. position of global supremacy in military financing, or Bernie Sanders, who views each imperialist war through an atomizing lens so that he can pick and choose which ones to support (such as the ones in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Syria to which he gave and gives thumbs up).

Given this reality and the hopelessness of leveraging the electoral process towards anti-war ends, the voter who would like to contribute to the stopping of imperialist war and militarist aggression only has one realistic option: throw away her vote. A protest vote for one of the “fifth party” candidates existing outside of the Big and Little League two-party systems (aka the four-party system) who may propose the actual abolition of capitalism and imperialist warfare is essentially equivalent to writing-in “flip tha system” and can be considered the most desirable fashion of throwing away one’s vote. The vote can be considered thrown away, because these candidates are denied even the hypothetical possibility of election by the nature of the system. But they are still a leg up over abstention because at least in certain cases they may be tallied and recorded, contributing to statistics which may stand as a testament to present levels of vanguard working class consciousness for generations to come, and at the very least there is a chance that, even if the write-in vote is not counted, it may appear as an unsettling anomaly to the one tasked with disregarding it. In that regard, and following the line of thought advanced by Eugene Debs on the desirability of not getting what one wants as opposed to getting what one doesn’t want, these hopeless votes are not thrown away but serve a kind of a purpose; they communicate anti-war sentiment.

Votes which can truly be considered thrown away are those cast “tactically” based in the doctrine of “lesser evilism”, in which case a vote for one of the peewees of the Little two parties registers simultaneous disaffiliation and affiliation with one of the Big two parties insofar as a Green vote is a disaffected Democratic vote and a Libertarian vote is a disaffected Republican vote. Then there are those who consider it better to vote for a Big evil (as opposed to the Little lesser evil), so long as it’s not the greatest Big evil. Perhaps the most twisted are those who believe it best to institute the most backward, reactionary, fascistic government possible, in the hope that this will be more likely to stir up revolt than a somewhat less murderous and oppressive bourgeois dictatorship, which is a dubious proposition to say the least. All these votes are thrown away, from the perspective of the anti-war voter, because they contribute to the perpetuation of mass criminal state violence and signal the voter’s consent to this, whether it be reluctant or enthusiastic.

The Next POTUS and the War-Profiteering of Futurity

A key point of unity in the political programs of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is their mutual promise to engage in war-profiteering once elected. To be sure, although there is a general consensus among the U.S. ruling class about the need to wage war for profit, there are indeed nuances between Clinton and Trump’s visions for the future of war-profiteering, rooted in a real cleavage of the U.S. bourgeoisie. While Trump has taken up the cause of the backwards and regressive old stock white supremacist and “nativist” bourgeoisie by advocating protectionism, trade tariffs, and the mass deportation of Mexicans as a sort of neo-Indian removal policy, Clinton represents the progressive faction of the bourgeoisie which embraces a new stock-inclusive white supremacy wherein the impression of cosmopolitanism is fostered by augmenting fluidity between manners of othering and ascribing social inferiority (i.e. by supplementing racism with civicism and culturism, allowing for the development of a black bourgeoisie), and the “progressive” extension of the government’s conception of whiteness as it is nowadays defined by institutions such as the Census Bureau and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which essentially occurs in two waves: first, the extension of whiteness in the 19th and early 20th centuries to the descendants of non-Anglo Saxon Germanic peoples and shortly thereafter to non-Germanic peoples of Christian Europe, followed by extension of whiteness in the late 20th and early 21st centuries which de-emphasized the alignment between Christianity and whiteness and began to include peoples of certain parts of Asia and Africa, the Balkans, Iberia, and Latin America as white persons.

The language deployed by the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns in the political platforms presented on their official websites is a 21st century confirmation of the assertion made long ago by high-ranking U.S. militarist turned anti-war dissident Smedley D. Butler that “War is a racket”. Although both campaigns frame their proposals for financial investment in war not as direct investment into warfare itself, but as investments in weapons manufacturing and war waging capabilities (i.e. the military industrial complex), both nevertheless take for granted that war is, was, and should continue to be a profitable business. Perhaps both presidential candidates have a sense that the public at large would find the proposal to perpetrate mass violence and terminate countless human lives in exchange for the accumulation of wealth distasteful if not presented delicately, cloaked as a call to invest in the mere machinery of war. However, this tactic is transparent; the call to invest in the tools and technologies of war is in fact inseparable from the call to invest in war itself, for these investments would be obsolete if there was no war in which to deploy them. And insofar as these weapons systems, war waging capabilities, and an empowered military industrial complex are said to function as a deterrent to hot war, they escalate the renewed cold war between great power factions, resulting in proxy-type wars.

Consider the following definitions from OxfordDictionaries.com before we examine the candidates’ programs more closely:

Racket – An illegal or dishonest scheme for obtaining money.

Invest – Put (money) into financial schemes, shares, property, or a commercial venture with the expectation of achieving a profit.

Profit – A financial gain, especially the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in buying, operating, or producing something.

Invest in a serious missile defense system to meet growing threats by modernizing our Navy’s cruisers and procuring additional, modern destroyers to counter the ballistic missile threat from Iran and North Korea.

The only “profit” this investment will bring to anyone other than “defense” contractors is the metaphorical wages paid to cover the psychological cost of irrational paranoia over “the ballistic missile threat [to people in North America] from Iran and North Korea”, countries whose militarism is largely a reaction to U.S. jingoism in the first place. Of course, we should also all know by now that “defense” is really a militarist dog whistle for “war”: the so-called United States Department of “Defense” was more accurately and less Newspeak-ishly called the “Department of War” between 1789 and 1947. Hence why, for Trump’s PR team, the way to “invest […] in […] defense” is by “procuring […] destroyers”!

The fact that Trump openly calls for (primarily poor non-U.S. citizen) human lives to be sacrificed for the purpose of (primarily rich white American) financial gain should not even come as a surprise, given the blatantly imperialist statements he and his associates like Rudolph Giuliani have made, such as:

“In the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils. Instead, all we got from Iraq—and our adventures in the Middle East—was death, destruction and tremendous financial loss.” — Donald Trump [X]

Enduring the Net-Centric Onslaught of the Ruling Class

While Hillary Clinton does employ the same lexical register of financial speculation to proudly raise the call for war-profiteering just as loudly and just as clearly as Donald Trump, her team’s investment pitch is nuanced by the form of “innovation” it advocates. The Klinton-Kaine Kampaign website (hillaryclinton.com) promises us that, “as president, Hillary will”:

Invest in innovation and capabilities that will allow us to prepare for and fight 21st-century threats. That includes leveraging our information advantage through what’s called “net-centric warfare” capabilities and preparing for asymmetric threats.

Clinton’s P.R. team has spiced up the war-for-profit pitch by plugging in a reference to what seems to be one of the latest militarist buzz phrases: “net-centric warfare”. A Wikipedia article on the term defines it as a “doctrine or theory” developed by the U.S. baby killer establishment in the 1990s which “seeks to translate an information advantage, enabled in part by information technology, into a competitive advantage through the robust computer networking of well informed geographically dispersed forces.”

In Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority (2000), David Alberts, John Garstka and Frederick Stein describe “Network Centric Warfare” as “the best term developed to date to describe the way [U.S. militarists] will organize and fight in the Information Age”.

The intuitive connection between networks, information, cyberspace, and global media is indicative of the fact that militarist buzzwords like “net-centric warfare”, “information warfare”, and “cyberwarfare” are essentially all iterations of the same thought process. Thus Hillary Clinton’s call to “invest” in Net-Centric Warfare in 2016 echoes her words to Congress in 2011, when she lamented (in a global context wherein non-American media networks such as Al Jazeera, RT, Sputnik, CCTV, and teleSUR were gaining traction in the Anglosphere as well as a stronger foothold in other regions) that “We are in an information war, and we’re losing that war”. Thus Hillary’s campaign pledge cannot be seen as an addendum thoughtlessly tacked on to the platform so as to pander to the pro-military crowd, but a longstanding sign of her approach to imperial affairs.

In Network Centric Operations: Background and Oversight Issues for Congress (2007), Clay Wilson explains that “Network Centric [Warfare] relies on computer equipment and networked communications technology to provide a shared awareness of the battle space [sic] for U.S. forces”.

One might well imagine some “Defense” clerks producing a flashy video of U.S. Army/Marine Corps baby killers consulting their smartwatches in between murdering savage Near Oriental men to “post statuses” on each other’s “timelines” about where the remainder of the unarmed men are seeking asylum from these brainwashed SS-worshipping death squads and “livestreaming” satellite images as they operate a genocidal dragnet across a dusty and generic Fallujah-esque town (perhaps filmed on the set of Homeland), their wounded comrades meanwhile being treated by medical androids remote controlled by ethically-compromised doctors on another continent, to sell this concept to bloodthirsty sociopaths in Washington D.C. The U.S. military would probably prefer that when the public hears the term “net-centric warfare”, it would imagine something like this, happening far away, directed at un-American others, and keeping America safe—but “leveraging ‘our’ information advantage” has much broader implications.

One indication that the scope of this project goes well beyond the battlespaces of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen is the fact that the term “net-centric warfare” is regarded as being synonymous with that of “net-centric operations” (Wilson, 2007). This supplanting of “warfare” by “operations,” like the supplanting of “battlefield” by “battlespace”, signals an important shift in the way U.S. militarists perceive the nature of conflict in the 21st century, sometimes referred to as the “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)”. The supplanting of the term “warfare” with that of “operations” marks a symbolic step towards the normalization of the state of perpetual warfare and the rendering ubiquitous of military operations outside their traditional spheres which have become reality under the so-called “War on Terror”.

This shifting emphasis in bourgeois military theory (from “warfare” to “operations”) can be traced back to the emergence of the “asymmetric warfare” paradigm (also alluded to by Clinton, cf. “asymmetric threats”) which began to gain currency towards the end of the genocidal U.S. war in Vietnam as baffled U.S. militarists struggled to fathom how their country had allowed them to be defeated (see “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars” [1975]). The architects of the U.S. genocide in Vietnam expressed dismay at their defeat because they felt there had not objectively been sufficient loss or degradation of U.S. military machinery or manpower to warrant defeat; instead they identified the erosion of the subjective political will to continue fighting among the U.S. populace as the cause of their defeat. This view can be summed up in the rhetorical question of one U.S. militarist: “Was the United States defeated in the jungles of Vietnam, or was it defeated in the streets of American cities?” [Aquino, p. 6].

Similarly observing that “[the Vietnam War] was fought as much, if not more, in the living rooms of America as in the living jungles of Southeast Asia,” the U.S. militarist authors of Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority resolve that “the battlespace of the future […] will no longer be private or remote” [Alberts, p. 63]. But because the “political costs of using [lethal weapons]” against domestic anti-war dissidents and peace activists are likely to “far outweigh their effects”, the crushing of domestic civilian and non-state actor threats to the will to sustain U.S. militarist campaigns of genocide abroad (“the national will to victory” [Aquino, p. 4]) is primarily viewed as being a job for methods like “Information Warfare”, “Military Information Support Operations (MISO)” (also known as “Psychological Operations [PSYOP]”), “Operations Other Than War (OOTW)” [Alberts, p. 59], and “Effects-Based Operations (EBO)” [Smith, p. 1], although that’s by no means to say that they don’t consider the brazen use of lethal force against U.S. citizens out of the question [X]. The same authors note that in “some instances” of so-called Operations Other Than War “the line between war and peace and between friend, foe, and neutral is blurred beyond recognition” and that Information Operations “blur the boundaries between civilian and military,” having “the potential to totally redefine the nature of warfare” [Alberts, p. 59].

The doctrine of “net-centric warfare” thus encapsulates the idea that anyone who does anything to oppose the U.S. war machine must be regarded as a foe of the state, including those who do so in totally non-violent ways such as:

marching in the street,

spreading reasoned anti-war and anti-capitalist arguments,

educating soldiers about their legal right to become conscientious objectors, freeing them from their supposedly irrevocable soul-selling contract to the devilish forces of militarism,

or even merely sharing objectively true raw pieces of information that would lead normal human beings to conclusions that are unsupportive of current military operations, diminishing what’s called “information dominance” by U.S. militarist fiends and neoliberals.

The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s helped to further entrench the paradigm of “asymmetric warfare”, as the subsequent Soviet/Russian geopolitical recession undid the relative symmetricality of what had previously been seen as a bipolar global battlespace. Nowadays the U.S. military behemoth swallows up a whopping 37% of global military spending, more than China, “Saudi” Arabia, Russia, the U.K., India, France, and Japan combined, perpetuating the asymmetry between U.S. militarism and all other centers of militarism, competitors and partners included. This trend is tempered however by certain developments, such as the so-called “Sino-Russian rapprochement” and the recent expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a geopolitical counterweight to U.S. military dominance and a vehicle for the joint operations of Russian and Chinese capitalists and militarists eager to further develop their own brands of imperialism.

Nevertheless, despite the Klinton Kaine Kampaign’s programmatic inclination towards the discourse of warfare (i.e. its selection of the term “net-centric warfare” as opposed to “net-centric operations”) and its characterization of Russia as “a foreign adversarial power”, the displacement of “warfare” by “operations” as the dominant theoretical framework of U.S. baby killer circles is unlikely to be reversed because the threat of massive nuclear annihilation encourages the reframing of 21st century conflict between similarly matched great power blocs as “symmetrical operations”. The current U.S.-Russian “cyber” or “information” war, although these refer to operations other than war in the traditional sense, may be considered a “symmetric” situation or perhaps even a situation of U.S. inferiority. For example, despite having an inferior budget, the number of Russian intelligence operatives in the U.S. is said to be at least three times superior to the number of U.S. ones in Russia [X]. Hillary Clinton and U.S. militarists’ broad conceptualization of warfare, redefined and expanded to include a variety of operations which were heretofore held to be “operations other than war”, should be read as an attempt to accelerate the militarization of domestic policing, expand proxy wars, and work around the limitations imposed by mutually assured destruction, not as an imminent push to engage Russia with nuclear warheads, as the peewee two-party system bourgeois candidate Jill Stein has argued in her alarmist pro-Trump lesser evilist discourse [X].

In a country with few immediate signs of threat to the national will to “victory” in the form of mass movements, perhaps just as critical as directly suppressing dissident voices, if not more so, is the manufacturing of consent which seems to assure that a minimal amount of dissent hardly pops up in the first place. We know that the U.S. and global public is targeted by the military and intelligence forces en masse through operations such as the “Message Force Multipliers” program, which sought to achieve “information dominance” by saturating U.S. television with war-mongering talking heads around the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Another example of this kind of operation is the Pentagon spending half a billion dollars on the production of “fake Al-Qaeda videos that portrayed the insurgent group in a negative light”. That’s almost an entire fiscal year of U.S. military funds spent on some videos—but how could we even know what the real U.S. ritual human sacrifice budget is when U.S. militarists can’t account for $6.5 trillion in funds [X]? Surely the fact that U.S. militarists do not release such information is part of some asinine strategy on their part to “leverage [their] information advantage” over us information scroungers who are not privy to those “classified” true facts. A President Jill Stein might well leave us with a military caste who can “only” not account for $3.25 trillion!

Towards a “Memetically Engineered” Racist Empire

One expression of “Effects-Based Operations” (which a U.S. militarist named Smith defines as “military operations directed at shaping the behavior of foes, friends, and neutrals in peace, crisis, and war”) is the emergent military strategy of “meme warfare” or “memetic engineering” [X, X, X]. Modelled on an analogy to genetics (the science of biological heredity) first posited by raging anti-Muslim bigot Richard Dawkins of the Islamophobic “New Atheist” set, memetics (the science[?] of cultural “heredity” [as well as intra-generational cultural transmission]) supposes the existence of the meme as a “unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds” [Brodie, p. 11]. Another theorist describes memetic engineering as the conscious construction of information packages which are likely “to replicate themselves across a network of minds” [X]. The prevalence of memes is thought to be “a consequence of our evolved capacity to imitate” [X]. Meme warfare proposes the weaponization of mimesis—delivering ideas to targets (enemies, friends, and neutrals) in such a way that they assimilate those ideas which in turn induce behaviors that facilitate the meeting of the weapon-handler’s objectives.

We can anticipate that the project of creating a memetically engineered (or psychocivilized) society entails the desirability of control and influence over information distribution networks as well as control and influence over the production of knowledge and information, helping to explain the drive of U.S. militarists to forcibly penetrate media and academia, like the horrific and snarling incubi which these demonic rape culture perpetuating militarists are.

Closely related to the concept to “memetic engineering” is “eumemics”. Like eugenicists, advocates of eumemics believe that populations can be “improved” by the manipulation and control of “scientists”, though in this case it is the pathologization of devalued thoughts (dubbed “mind viruses”), not biological traits, which prevails. Nevertheless, memeticists do hypothesize that “memes drove biological selection as well as genes” [McNamara].

The transition from eugenics to eumemics nevertheless proceeds relatively seamlessly from the perspective of so-called “race science”, for the neo-Nazi movement’s embrace of anti-Semitic American fascist Francis Parker Yockey’s critique of materialistic scientism reveals a perspective on “race” which leads quickly to the supplantation of eugenics by eumemics.

In “The Scientific-Technical World-Outlook” (a chapter from his 1948 book Imperium), Yockey argues that “[by 1850] science was on the road which was to cultuminate in […] frank admission of the subjectivity of physical concepts”, that “the very study of matter itself” revealed “the profound knowledge […] that matter is only the envelope of the soul”, and that “the transition from 19th century materialism to the new spirituality of the 20th century was thus not a battle, but an inevitable development”. For Yockey, the neo-Nazi worldview is not based on science or materialism, although these are seen as useful “in the service of […] unlimited will-to-power”. The Nazi blowhard concludes that “the Idea [of a strong Western Culture that ‘creates Races’ and is the ‘higher Reality’] is primary,” though “superiority in weapons [furnished by techno-scientific methodology] is essential”. Neo-Nazism thus attempts to remedy the fact that the racial basis of German Nazism was objectively pseudoscientific by dislocating race from this framework and repackaging it as a transcendent subjectivity, beyond science and pseudoscience. This outlook may be rooted in the adoption of an “asymmetric” model of warfare by Nazi strategists in the post-war years, in which case Operation Paperclip signals the beginning of the supplantation of “warfare” by “operations”.

In another chapter of Imperium on the “Subjective Meaning of Race”, the fascist Yockey argues that “race is […] what a man feels” and that “this [feeling] influences, whether immediately or eventually, what he does”. “Race is not,” according to Yockey, “the way one talks, looks, gestures, walks, it is not a matter of stock, color, anatomy, skeletal structure, or anything else objective”. He further elaborates that “every race […] expresses a certain idea […] and its idea is bound to be attractive to some individuals outside it”, and that “every healthy, ascendant race accepts recruits who come in on its terms and who have the proper feeling”. This notion of the “true meaning” of race being a subjective feeling, existing independently of objective scientific study, is expressed by government policy in cases such as United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the law must uphold a “popular”, but “unscientific” conception of the so-called “white race” [X]. Popular and governmental conceptions did evolve thereafter, but remain unscientific. Perhaps it is this subjectivity that permits anomalous individuals such as Leo Felton, an African-American man, to become accepted as leaders in White Power prison gangs [X], and others, such as Barack Obama, to become legatees of the world’s leading white supremacist institutions.

From Memes to Occultism

The so-called “Alt-Right movement”, an “innovative” reiteration anti-Semitic, white supremacist, and Nazi bullshit for the Information Age which has emerged as one of the most vocal factions of Donald Trump supporters, places a heavy emphasis on memes and the memetic model of cultural evolution [X, X]. One “Alt-”right-wing 8chan forum set up last year calls itself “The Bureau of Memetic Warfare” and greets visitors with a “Black Sun” banner. It would almost be “edgy” if U.S. militarists had not already proposed a “Meme Warfare Center” a decade sooner [Prosser].

Seeming to fulfill the late comic George Carlin’s prediction that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts, it will not be with jack-boots; it will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts,” The Daily Stormer, an Alt-Right website, notes that “a movement which meets all of the [Southern Poverty Law Center]’s definitions of Neo-Nazi White Supremacism using a cartoon frog to represent itself takes on a subversive power to bypass historical stereotypes of such movements, and thus present the ideas themselves in a fun way without the baggage of Schindler’s List [sic] and American History X [sic].” They are talking about the so-called “Pepe”, a cartoon frog and internet-centric meme which even the Klinton Kaine Kampaign has addressed [X].

The same neo-Nazi website notes that “the Alt-Right is in the process of forming an actual religious doctrine around the god Kek, who is believed to be the spiritual root of meme magick” [X]. Alt-Right occultists have actually come to believe that the net-centric meme “Pepe the Frog” is a hierophany of the Ancient Egyptian god called Kek, who was depicted as a frog or theriocephalous frog-man [X].

Of course, some Alt-Right “irony bros” will inevitably fall back on the plausible deniability tactic when it suits them, and claim that internet meme-cum-hierophany discourse is pure satire done simply for “the lulz”; however, it is obvious from white nationalist texts like “Esoteric Kekism, or Kek as a Bodhisattva of Racial Enlightenment” that there is a genuine desire on the part of the so-called “Alt-Right” to engage in the time-honored fascist pastime of blatant cultural misappropriation of Eastern religious traditions so as to try to rehash yet again the aestheticized pseudo-mystique of an esoteric neo-Nazism, pioneered by “classics” like Maximine Julia Portas (“Savitri Devi”). Plausible deniability of the sincerity of Alt-Right discourse is stoked by public figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, who has emerged as a cultural broker between the mainstream world and the largely web-bound (net-centric) movement. In aMarch 2016 Breitbart piece, Yiannopoulos argued that the reactionary/misogynistic/racist memes produced by the movement are merely meant to poke fun at “political correctness”, but the other representatives of the Alt-Right have vehemently scoffed at the idea that “no one in the Alt-Right actually believes anything that they are saying, and simply say it as part of some obscure joke” [X, X]. Meanwhile, there are others on the Alt-Right who are less chagrined by the fact that a gay Jewish man (Yiannopoulos) has become their unofficial spokesperson, basically seeing him as a useful idiot who is “contributing to the rightward shift in the Overton Window” [X].

Right-wing occultists are likely to the view those who “ironically” or “jokingly” spread the “Cult of Kek” and “meme magick” memes in a similar light, as the former use it to recruit devotees and initiates to their race-hate occultist worldview (see, for example, the Alt-Rightist recommendation made in the hypertext of the previous link that readers familiarize themselves with the work of British occultists Phil Hine and Peter J. Carroll to begin understanding “meme magick” as a form of “chaos magick”). “Chaos magick” is in turn considered to be a form of Satanism by prominent proponents of Satanism. For example, Anton Long (alleged alias of David Myatt, a proponent of neo-Nazi Satanism) writes in “Toward Understanding Satanism” (a “classic Order of Nine Angles text”) that, “standard definitions of Satanism […] encompass, and so may describe […] the type of esotericism propounded by advocates of ‘chaos magick’ and others who assert such things as ‘reality is what I make it or what others have made it, or perceived it to be’, so that ‘Reality is a matter is perspective [sic] and thus demons/gods/religions/techniques beliefs can be usefully used without believing in them’” [X]. Hine is extensively cited as an authority in the book Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology (2009) [X] and Carroll has associated with activists in the British neo-Nazi movement via his involvement in the magazine Chaos International [X, X]. Additionally, in a subsection of The Occult World (2014) entitled “Contemporary Occult War”, religions studies professor Christopher Partridge relates that the interest of Carroll (described here as “the founder of of chaos magic”) in waging “a purely politicized occult war in the form of a conspiracist libertarian condemnation of the European Union” should be contextually understood in relation to “the ‘sinister’ family of traditions derived from the [‘(explicit concern) with esoteric conflict against Jewish influences’ of the] Order of Nine Angles” (the previously mentioned neo-Nazi/Satanic group which developed out of English Wicca in the late 1960s or early ’70s) [Partridge, pp. 632-3].

Another self-described “Satanic” grouping, with documented ties to U.S. militarism and whose original High Priest’s contributions to the theoretical framework of U.S. militarist operations in the 1980s prefigure the emergence of Net-Centric Warfare in the 1990s in ways explored below, is the “Temple of Set”. This occultist religious sect was founded in 1975 by the U.S. militarist Michael Aquino, a PSYOPs officer during the U.S. genocide-war in Vietnam, after he left his position as a high-ranking member of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. In addition to reported disillusionment with LaVey’s proposal to sell positions in the Church of Satan to those willing to pay big bucks, the split may have arisen in part from what Aquino saw as the Church of Satan’s equivocal stance on the question of whether Satan was “real” or “symbolic”. “The Temple of Set”, Aquino writes in Black Magic (1975-2010), “resolved this dilemma […] by asserting the actual existence of ‘Satan’ (as Set – the original, pre-Judaeo/Christian entity)” [X]. Aquino’s collapsing of Christianity into Judaism and expression of desire to bypass its framework by displacing the figure of Satan with that of Set can be seen as an iteration of the same anti-Semitic concern with “esoteric conflict against Jewish influences” described by Partridge (2014). The anti-Semitic leitmotiv of Western esotericists can be traced back even further, to foundational figures of the contemporary occultist worldview such as Aleister Crowley, who lamented that “The Jew has eaten his way into everything. The caricature of Semitic thought, Christianity, rotted Roman virtue through introducing the moral subterfuge of vicarious atonement” [X]. In many ways modern proponents of “magick” in the West are heavily indebted to blatant cultural misappropriation which was facilitated by European colonialism. (For examples of the way in which contemporary Western esotericism and occultism cannot be contextually separated from their basis in Orientalism and cultural misappropriation, see the pivotal role played by European, especially British, colonialism in opening up “mystical” countries like Egypt and India to raging anti-Semitic white supremacists such as Aleister Crowley, Helena Blavatsky, and C. W. Leadbeater).

Like the newly “founded” occult-oriented neo-Nazi “Cult of Kek”, the “Temple of Set” was also based on cultural misappropriation of Ancient Egyptian/Kemetic mythology. The Egyptian gods Set and Kek share a number of similarities. Both have been called gods of chaos. Ancient Egypt Online notes that Set “was a storm god associated with strange and frightening events” including “eclipses” and that “his glyph appears in the Egyptian words for ‘turmoil’, ‘confusion’, […] ‘storm’ and ‘rage’” [X]. The same source indicates that Kek (or Kuk) “represented darkness, obscurity and night” and that “this darkness was the chaotic darkness which existed before the creation of the world [and] although he was a god of the darkness, he was also associated with the dawn and given the epithet, the ‘bringer-in of the light’” [X]. It is further noted that Kek “was also associated with Sobek”, depicted as a theriocephalous crocodile-man who was said to be the son of Set—who also took the form of a crocodile [X].

The Religious Character of Net-Centric Warfare

Net-Centric Warfare theorists posit the existence of three domains relevant to the warfighter:

The quasi-religious underpinnings of this three-domain model of the battlespace need to be rendered explicit to understand, in the following section, Net-Centric Warfare as a reflection of the darker side of modern Western “esoteric” thought. We would also do well to take into consideration and keep in mind the argument of religions scholar Mircea Eliade that, contrary to what may still be considered conventional wisdom by some, religion “does not necessarily imply belief in God, gods, or ghosts, but refers to the experience of the sacred, and consequently, is related to ideas of being, meaning, and truth” [X].

Though the doctrine of the domains of Net-Centric Warfare is presented as trinitarian in form, in essence it replicates the Cartesian dualist meme; it is the bifurcation of the battlespace into physical and cognitive fronts, echoing long-posited binary oppositions between the body and mind, the material and the spiritual, which is fundamental to Net-Centric Warfare theory. Information is an intermediary between these two poles because it “inhabits” consciousness (where it is processed), but it can also be materialized into the external world via systems of communication (e.g. a book contains information which derives from the cognitive domain but exists in the physical domain). The “information domain” is thus not autonomous, but exists only in the relation to, and as an aspect of, the physical and cognitive domains. (The question of the nature of the information domain and its relation to the central dichotomy between tangible (external/physical) and intangible (internal/cognitive) which we find in the discourse of Net-Centric Warfare can also be located in the field of memetics, in the debate between memeticists of “internalist” and “externalist” persuasions [X]). The information domain is therefore secondary to the fundamental dynamic of Net-Centric Warfare, which is concerned with the ability to influence a target’s feeling or cognitive state so as to affect what he or she does in the world, thus altering the physical state of the battlefield. Net-Centric Warfare utilizes objective means (such as physical control of external information flows) to target subjective phenomena (e.g., morale, the “will to victory”, the will to resist, and the “will-to-power”). This is why “information dominance” is in fact a euphemism for “cognitive dominance”.

Returning to the notion of “the sacred” as the defining element of religion, we see that Net-Centric Warfare is in essence a theological expression of U.S. militarism in the way that it recognizes the mind itself as sacred. The Cartesian split between spirit and matter observed in U.S. militarist doctrine is imbued with the analogue which Mircea Eliade called the sacred-profane polarity and analysis of the discourse on Net-Centric Warfare (and similar militarist buzzwords) reveals numerous traits consistent with a type of religious thought. Elaborating on this dichotomy between sacrality and profanity which he argued was key to understanding the constitution of religious thought, Eliade put forth in The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959) that:

[In] all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. […] The polarity sacred-profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. […] Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power [X, pp. 12-13].

By inaugurating the pursual of general dominance in the “cognitive domain” as the ultimate key to victory in any war, the cognitive apparatuses of not only enemy combatants and their host populations, but also those of the U.S. military protagonists’ civilian co-nationals became consecrated as sites of battle. For U.S. militarists, the lesson drawn from their defeat in Vietnam was that domination of the battlefield’s physical domain amounts to an unreal victory if the enemy is still able to “leverage information superiority” and prevail in the cognitive domain. The consequence of being made acutely aware of the possibility of defeat in spite of superior physical force was the invigoration of a militarist discourse around the menace of “asymmetric threats”. To pursue an old-fashioned warfighting strategy that did not adequately take the nature of “asymmetric threats” into account became sacrilege. Focusing too narrowly on the physical, material domain (unreal) at the expense of having a sense of concern for the cognitive, spiritual domain (real) became a form of profanity in the militarist mind, a vulgarization of what it means to pursue victory, a kind of false idol worship. The newfound reality of the all-encompassing nature of war, its delineation so blurred that it was no longer distinguishable from peace, no longer fought exclusively on the traditional “battlefield” but across a vaster “battlespace” that penetrates inside the hearts and minds of “foes, friends, and neutrals in peace, crisis, and war” was the new theology of Militarism. War was profane; operations became sacred.

U.S. militarist Michael Aquino, the self-proclaimed “Setian” Satanist who ran PSYOPs in Vietnam in the early part of his career, called this shift from the battlefield of the physical domain to the battlespace of the cognitive one “MindWar”. In a 1980 military research paper co-written with another U.S. militarist named Paul Vallely (now a Fox News “senior military analyst”—i.e. Message Force Multiplier) and entitled “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory” Aquino (and Vallely, although Aquino’s voice seems to dominate the text) explain how, in their view, victory on the physical battlefield is only assured by militarist domination of the cognitive battlespace. One source claims that although the paper never appeared in its intended publication outlet (Military Review), it was nevertheless “widely circulated among military planners, and […] distributed by Aquino’s Temple of Set” [X]. Implying that commanders should be more concerned with the conquest of minds than with “tangible” victories, Aquino writes:

The MindWar scenario must be preeminent in the mind of the commander and must be the principal factor in his every field decision. Otherwise he sacrifices measures which actually contribute to winning the war to measures of immediate, tangible satisfaction.

It seems clear that Aquino’s articulation of the need for U.S. militarism to switch gears from traditional war to sublime MindWar developed in tandem with his involvement in the Satanic cult scene. In one of his more esoteric ramblings, Aquino notes that,

Perhaps the most important contribution of the original Church of Satan (1966-1975CE) was its focus upon and glorification of the psyche, even though its original ambition was to downplay that concept in favor of mere fleshly gratification [X].

This critique was likely formed, if these precise words were not themselves written, around the time of his break with the Church of Satan to form the Temple of Set in 1975, five years before writing the “MindWar” paper. With the help of a thesaurus, his criticism of the Church of Satan’s undue emphasis on “fleshly gratification” became that directed at the U.S. military for its undue emphasis on “tangible satisfaction” (i.e. the “physical domain”). Moreover, his appreciation of the Church of Satan’s “focus upon and glorification of the psyche” forms the entire basis of the MindWar doctrine, with its focus upon and glorification of the cognitive domain.

Aquino argues that MindWar only operates in “nonlethal, noninjurious, and nondestructive ways” and that it essentially amounts to “[overwhelming] your enemy with argument.” This is apparently as simple as “[seizing] control of all the means by which [the enemy] government and populace process information to make up their minds, and [adjusting] it so that those minds are made up as you desire”. But Aquino also makes it clear that, in the MindWar scenario, the U.S. populace is approached by its would-be militarist overlords as an enemy. While at first painting Americans who called for the defeat of the U.S. effort to commit genocide in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as victims fallen to the lies of enemy propaganda, Aquino goes on to imply that MindWar “must attack and ultimately destroy” the will of anti-war citizens because their opposition to the jingoistic “national will to victory” of the U.S. is merely a sign of their weakness and vulnerability to enemy psychological operations, arguing:

[The main PSYOP/MindWar effort] must originate at the national level. It must strengthen our national will to victory and it must attack and ultimately destroy that of our enemy. It both causes and is affected by physical combat, but it is a type of war which is fought on a far more subtle basis as well – in the minds of the national populations involved.

[…]

MindWar must target all participants if it is to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war.

Of course, to accept MindWar as “noninjurious” and “nondestructive”, we would have to ignore the destruction and injury such a practice perpetrates against freedom of thought, freedom of information, and freedom of expression. We would also have to ignore that, given the fact that in most cases and for obvious reasons (e.g. bumbling U.S. militarists’ inability to even speak “enemy” languages) it is more feasible for U.S. militarists to strengthen the U.S. national will to victory with programs like the “Message Force Multipliers” than it is for them to “destroy” the will of the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries to resist U.S. military occupations and bombing campaigns, MindWar perpetuates lethal operations and augments the death toll by keeping the U.S. populace compliant with the war effort and consistently failing to keep “enemy” populations submissive to occupation forces and unresentful of U.S. bombing campaigns. In what seems a telling Freudian slip, Aquino recently uttered, “MindWar […] was an attempt to […] stress out the conscious parts of the human mind, to sort of […] create a mind slave” [X].

Aquino’s twisted conception of “truth” is also revealing of the fact that we are dealing with a religious concept when we talk about Net-Centric Warfare and MindWar. Arguing that legal restrictions on PSYOPs which forbid them from being deployed against the U.S. public are wrongheaded, Aquino writes:

Under existing United States law, PSYOP units may not target American citizens. That prohibition is based upon the presumption that “propaganda” is necessarily a lie or at least a misleading half-truth, and that the government has no right to lie to the people. The Propaganda Ministry of Goebbels must not be a part of the American way of life.

Quite right, and so it must be axiomatic of MindWar that it always speaks the truth. Its power lies in its ability to focus recipients’ attention on the truth of the future as well as that of the present. MindWar thus involves the stated promise of the truth that the United States has resolved to make real if it is not already so.

Here we arrive at the eschatological aspect of U.S. militarist doctrine; it deals with the end of days or the end of an age. By laying claim to knowledge of future events, to the power to preordain or predestine the ultimate outcome of any given U.S. military endeavor (which will invariably be “victory”), Aquino invokes what Afrofuturism scholars dub “the futures industry”, a synthesis of the “scientific and corporate activity [of ‘big science’ and ‘big business’] into a relatively coherent narrative” which is “then [disseminated] throughout the world [by ‘global media’]” in this way exercising control over the future through the art of prediction and the imperial production of futurist narratives [Eshun, Yaszek]. Investment in the futures industry is evidenced by the work of think-tanks such as the “Project for the New American Century”, and the impetus towards an eschatological approach is demonstrated by U.S. policy-maker initiatives to transform the “War on Terror” into a “New Thirty Years’ War”. The interest of the bourgeois futures industry in occultism may also derive from the latter’s conceptualization of “aeonics” (“the magical manipulation of ‘psycho-historical’ forces” [Partridge, p. 632]) or “aeonic magick” (i.e. the kind of magic “concerned with producing large-scale [civilizational] changes [‘altering the destiny of millions of peoples’] over […] centuries” [X]).

Net-Centric Warfare as Black Magic

The first words had a magical aspect to them, and the modern word still retains much of the powerful magicality of the primitive utterance. With words, one person can render another happy or push them to despair, and it’s with the help of words that the professor transmits her knowledge to students, that an orator leads his audience to predetermined conclusions, affecting their decisions. Words provoke emotions and constitute the general means by which human beings reciprocally influence one another.

In light of the exposition of the religiosity implied by Net-Centric Warfare theory and its constituent concepts (including but not limited to: the physical/information/cognitive domains, meme warfare, information warfare, operations other than war, and psychological operations), as well as the occultism of its state actor pioneers (Aquino/the Temple of Set) and non-state actor practitioners (the Alt-Right/the Cult of Kek), it is reasonable to expect that further unpacking Net-Centric Warfare in the context of its esoteric underpinnings will help to demystify its actual workings. As a consequence of seeking an answer to the question “What is Net-Centric Warfare?”, we have been been confronted by the pioneers and practitioners of it with the concept of “magic[k]” and a variety of “types” of it, including: meme magick, chaos magick, black magick, and aeonic magick.

When we talk about “black magic” in particular, it is possible understand a number of different things. It is commonly understood that “black magic” is the evil kind, while “white magic” is the good kind; the person whose words render another happy does white magic and the one who pushes another to despair does black magic. Black magic and white magic are also said to correspond to the terms “Left Hand Path and Right-Hand Path”. Some have argued that good and evil are relative to the perspective of the individual, the cultural or class grouping, and that for this reason “black magic” cannot be equated with evil, nor can “white magic” be equated with good. The Temple of Set’s Michael Aquino would be an example of someone who falls into this camp, in that, although his religious worldview is indebted to a profound degree to early modern occultists such as Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky, he does not seem to like the fact that they used the terms black magic and white magic “simply to identify their moral biases” (in the sense that they upheld the convention that black stands for that which is immoral and white stands for that which is moral). For Aquino, “black magic” (or the “left-hand path”) does not imply any “moral or ethical stance”, since according to him, it refers to one of two approaches to magic in general “rather than to the ends to which [it is] applied” [X, p. 31]. However, given what we know about Aquino’s almost five decades of prominence on the Satanic cult scene, we cannot take his theory of morally ambiguous “black magic” as a pure abstraction; consideration of his actual life and career, which we have already seen was dedicated not just to serving, but also enhancing the efficacy of, the genocidal enterprise of U.S. militarism, might be taken as an indication of this particular approach’s predisposition to being used towards unethical ends.

A closer examination of Aquino’s discourse in Black Magic(1975-2010) reveals that his attempt to dissociate the concept of black magic from its common definition (evil) is mired in contradictions. Here Aquino argues that the ideal member of his Satanic cult is “initially amoral” but that the cult “does argue for a high personal ethical standard” which is based on a Platonic “love of and dedication to virtue for its own sake – not on social or religious-ideological conditioning, threats, or enticements” [Aquino, p. 4]. Elsewhere in Black Magic, however, Aquino does express clear concern about safeguarding what he calls the “ethical reputation of the Temple” [p. 40], noting that, “Only if [a Satanist is] known to be a strictly ethical individual will [his or her] freedom from social norms be tolerated. Otherwise [he or she] will be ostracized and probably persecuted by society” [p. 94]. Contradicting his initial claim that the Temple’s argument for its members’ high ethical standards is not based on “social or religious-ideological conditioning, threats, or enticements”, Aquino admonishes his followers that ritually sacrificing “any life-form” will result in “the offender’s immediate expulsion [from the cult] and referral to law enforcement or animal protection authorities” [p. 119]. Aquino again contradicts his initial claim of the cult’s recognition of the supremacy of the individual Satanist’s “personal ethical standard” over “social conditioning” when he elaborates on the formula by which the Satanist is to avoid persecution/cultivate an ethical reputation: he is to “determine not only whether [a particular black magic ‘working’] will be ethical in his eyes, but also ethical according to the cultural mind-sets of all other parties to the working” [p. 106]. We see thus that the Temple of Set’s concern about projecting out an “ethical reputation” as a law-abiding, non-human/animal (or even plant) sacrificing cult into the world functions as a defense mechanism, its “ethical reputation” being a mere shell to protect its actual mission, which is to create an “unsafe space” (since Aquino asserts that black magic is “dangerous”) for “freedom from social norms” and the “social morality” [p. 112] of intrusive “subjective universes” (Aquino’s term) of other psyches, to the extent that such freedom and occult deviancy can be cultivated without provoking ostracization and persecution by the wider society.

Aquino’s concern with dissociating black magic from its connotation of evil cannot be understood without apprehending his view that “‘good/evil’ values are merely appropriate for the profane masses, who can’t – and don’t want to – understand anything more precise” [p. 106]. Aquino’s attempt to dissociate black magic from its connotation of evil mirrors the way in which his conception of the net-centric MindWar doctrine was intimately tied up with the desire to dissociate U.S. militarism (particularly in Southeast Asia) from its connotations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Turning the basic question of what is good and what is bad into a mystical equation serves to transform that which is unethical (imperialist war, use of “black magic” to manipulate the “profane masses” into compliance with the former by painting it as “good” from the perspective of their class-blind/class-collaborative “national interests”) into that which is ethical. Publicly identifying oneself as a Satanist and establishing a cult institution with the exoteric façade of an “ethical reputation” rather than keeping one’s wacko beliefs to oneself would seem to serve the purpose of, not only empowering oneself and gaining social influence (to the extent that one can accrue cult members and rise in the military industrial hierarchy), but also transforming the lay public’s perception of Satanists into its opposite—i.e. from equating Satanism with evil and unethical practices to equating it with decent, ethical people who don’t really want to hurt anyone.

What does make the term “black magic” problematic is not its moral connotation by itself, but this in combination with its racial one. We must be skeptical when accusations of “black magic” are levelled in order to smear that which is genuinely good. For example, televangelist Pat Robertson has infamously called Haitians “cursed” in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2010 for “[swearing] a pact with the devil” [X], in reference to the sacrificial Voodoo ritual performed in the Kayiman woods which is said to have initiated the slave rebellion against French rule, which was a revolution whose basis was the super-exploited and racialized enslaved proletariat of the island. From the perspective of international scientific socialist and transmodern decolonial communist ethics, the Haitian revolution was much more ethical than anything the Temple of Set ever did—even if we are to accept that the former did involve animal sacrifice and the latter wouldn’t hurt a fly—because it was revolutionary and promoted freedom while the latter was/is a cesspit of fascist U.S. militarist reaction. Certain African and Afro-diasporic artists have appropriated terms commonly associated with “Satanism” in Western thought such as “black magic” and “black mass” to affect decolonization. For example, in the music video to the song “Black Magic Woman”, the Ghanaian singer Azizaa plays up the notion of “black magic” and some of its tropes in a way that is feminist and coloniality-confronting. It is dubious however to suppose that the “path” of revolutionary or afrofuturist “black magicians” such as Dutty Boukman or Sun Ra is one and the same as that taken by imperial militarist or fascist “black magicians” such as Michael Aquino or David Myatt/Anton Long. Their paths could not be more opposite. Furthermore, two people cannot follow the same “path” and arrive at different ends, unless they started at different ends, and in that case one’s left-hand would be the other’s right.

Although it is genuinely possible to detourne “black magic” from connotations of evil as certain artists have succeeded in doing, we will nevertheless put aside the problematic “black is wack, white is right” racial baggage of the “black magic/white magic” distinction from this point forth and use the term black magic in the traditional sense of pertaining to that which is evil, as we move now to analyse bourgeois Net-Centric Warfare as it relates to the black magic worldview of its U.S. militarist, neo-Nazi, Satanist, and bigoted Eurocentrist neo-pagan pioneers and practitioners.

* * *

Many of the constituent concepts of the theory of Net-Centric Warfare can be read as analogues to those which are elaborated upon by self-proclaimed Satanic organizations. To illustrate these striking parallels, which show how the idea of “black magic” as it is understood/explained by Satanic groups meshes almost perfectly with that of “Net-Centric Warfare”, a three-column table is presented below. The first two columns in the table present the terminology used by the Satanic cults known as the “Temple of Set” and the “Order of Nine Angles”. According to religions professor Connell Monette, these are two out of the “three western esoteric groups that are openly aligned with the Left Hand Path” (i.e. black magic) [X], the other being the “Church of Satan” (founded by Anton LaVey in 1966 as the first above ground, openly Satanic organization). Monette’s claim is likely inaccurate (see other groups such as the Satanic Temple, Brotherhood of Satan, etc.—though some of these may treat the figure of Satan as “symbolic”), but these are certainly what we might call “the big three”.

As previously alluded to, the Temple of Set split off from the Church of Satan in 1975 when many of its members became disillusioned with LaVeyan Satanism and can thus be seen as its successor, so LaVey’s cult has been omitted from the table. The Order of Nine Angles, meanwhile, is also said to have formed sometime in the 1960s or 1970s in Shropshire, England but takes a more “underground” approach. Its number of adherents is rumored to range anywhere from a handful of people or even a single individual using numerous aliases (David Myatt) all the way to anywhere from 300 to 2,000 people spread throughout the world [Monette, 2014]. Both the Temple of Set and the Order of Nine Angles proclaim themselves to be genuine Satanists, with Aquino stating that the Temple upholds the “actual existence” of Satan and Myatt stating that the Order represents “traditional Satanism”. There are some signs that the Order of Nine Angles was influenced or took inspiration from the Church of Satan; e.g. its name is said to have been appropriated from a text called “Ceremony of Nine Angles” written by Aquino in 1971 when he was a member of the Church of Satan (although the Order claims its name comes “from an aspect of esoteric tradition which existed before [1966]”[X]) and the pen name of the Order’s primary theorist (“Anton Long”) also seems to have been pastiched from the name of Anton LaVey, former head of the Church of Satan.

One of the most fundamental differences between the Temple of Set and the Order of Nine Angles is their approach to public relations. While the Temple, as we have seen, is concerned about maintaining an “ethical reputation” and not portraying itself as evil, the Order actively tries to cultivate an evil reputation. It does this in part by defending human sacrifice as “part of traditional Satanism”. To become a full-fledged “Adept” of the Order, one is expected to partake in what it calls “human culling” to “[remove] the worthless and thus [improve] the stock”. Monette mentions that ONA members are said to have joined police and military forces in seeking out opportunities to kill people and the Order also claims that in 2011, “several images were circulated on the internet of someone in NATO-issued combat fatigues with a NATO-issued weapon and nextto an O9A sigil [in Afghanistan]” [X].

In The Satanic Letters of Stephen Brown: Vol. I—which detail written correspondence between the Order of Nine Angles and the Temple of Set from 1990 to 1992 (in addition to ONA letters to third parties)—the ONA criticizes Aquino’s group for instructing its members to disaffiliate from and disavow connections to Satanic groups and individuals advocating human sacrifice (e.g. the Order of Nine Angles) and pedophilia (e.g. the “Ordo Templi Baph-metis” and its magazine Abraxas, which were both under the thumb of a member of the Temple of Set named James Martin). Here the ONA derides Aquino and the Temple of Set as inauthentic Satanists, insufficiently loyal to the genuine “tenets of traditional Satanism” because their policy of public disaffiliation with persons openly calling for sexual abuse and murder constitutes “a code of ethics which members must adhere to”. In a true Satanic organization, the ONA argues, “there is nothing that is restricted or forbidden”.

However, it can also be remarked that the ONA’s literature is similar to that of Aquino’s in that it is riddled with internal contradictions. While human sacrifice and sexual abuse are necessarily permitted under the premise of “nothing is forbidden”, the ONA literature on “culling” nevertheless mentions that “victims [of human sacrifice] can never be children” and “voluntary sacrifices are always male”, thus positing restrictions on the practice [X, pp. 12, 14]. The fact that the ONA generally posits human sacrifice within a eugenics type framework (by virtue of likening it to “culling”) also contradicts the claim that the organization embraces evil, given that the supposed goal here is to improve the human race and do it good by transforming it into a more highly evolved god-race which Myatt calls “Homo Galactica”. The claim of “no restrictions” on individual members of the Satanic cult also disappears when the ONA literature notes that a “group wishing to conduct such a sacrifice with magickal intent must first obtain permission from the Grand Master or Grand Lady Master” [ibid., p. 12].

We also find in the Satanic Letters that in about 1986 or 1987 Aquino was a sent “a copy of a magazine called Ganymede” which had “a reputation in the UK for promoting pedastry and paedophilia” because “Martin had written an article” in the magazine which “was […] along those lines”. After members of the “Setian” priesthood were ordered by Aquino to “interview” James Martin, he resigned from the Temple. (This would have been right at the beginning or middle of the Presidio of San Francisco military base sex scandal in which Aquino was accused of sexually abusing dozens of children.) Additionally, it is explicitly revealed that at least one member of the Temple of Set, identified as “John [REDACTED]” later known by the alias “Richard Saunders or Bro Richard of Shropshire”, had a “working relationship” with the Order of Nine Angles via the “Brotherhood of Balder” (an organization in which he “held dual membership […] whilst a Priest of Set”). The Satanic Letters implicitly suggest a working relationship between the ONA and another (then) member of the Temple of Set, the New Zealand neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton, because in the Letters ONA member “Stephen Brown” (probably David Myatt) is forwarded a copy of and replies to an intra-Temple of Set letter between Bolton and a U.K.-based “David Austen” within a few weeks of it being sent.

Examine below each row from left to right as you observe the parallels between Satanic cult and U.S. militarist jargons.

Net-Centric Warfare as Black Magic:

Similarities in Conceptualization Between Occult Groups and the U.S. Military

“the ‘physical’ universe described by three spatial dimensions […] and linear time”

Being, order, linear, progressive, evolutionary

Physical Domain

“the place where the situation the military seeks to influence exists”

“where physical platforms and thecommunications networks that connect them reside”

“encompasses all the physical actions or stimuli thatbecome the agents for the physical andpsychological effects we seek to create”

Magical Link (ML)

“The concept of magic postulates that there is a continuous ‘linkage’generally referred to as the Magical Link (ML) – between the OU and [Subjective Universes]. Hence a change occurring in one will have at least a partially similar effect in the other.”

Gate/Nexion or

The Abyss (1)

“the region where the ‘acausal’ and the ‘causal’ meet”

“The individual is but a nexion: an affective and effective means of synchronicity, ofChange”

Information Domain

“Where information lives”

Where “collecting and reporting [of information] to create a shared situation awareness” happens

“encompasses all of the means of [translating] acognitive response into physical actions”

Subjective Universe (SU)

“the ‘lenses’ or ‘windows’ through which the OU is perceived, assigned significance, and interpreted.”

Acausal World/Realm

Non-being, chaos, irrational, the Occult, magick

the universe (or universes […]) described by an unspecified number of spatial dimensionsand by non-linear (or acausal) time.

Cognitive Domain

“in the minds of the participants”

“the place where perceptions, awareness, understanding, beliefs, and values reside”

Where “sensemaking [and] decisions are made”

“the domain of intangibles”

Its internal workings cannot be observed [Smith, p. 386]

Causal aspect

of the acausal world

Consciousness, rational thought, science, logic

Observables

“parts of the cognitive process” that are “observable”

“reflections of the cognitive domain decisionmaking process that occur in the information and physical domains”

The Abyss

“the ethereal chasm between that which man can systematize and that which is infinitely beyond the reach of his most advanced mathematical estimates” [X]

The Abyss (2)

“a connexion between the individual and the acausal”

“separates our everyday consciousness from the consciousness(and thus apprehension) of the Dark Gods”

Surveillance Systems

“the interface between the cognitive domain and the informationdomain”

A connection between the reflections of the cognitive process that are observable and intangible awareness

“the means by which a stimulus is recognized and conveyed to a human or to a human organization”

Acausal aspect

of the acausal world

Unconsciousness, the unconscious mind

“The Dark Gods”

Non-observables

“cannot be measured,and therefore, cannot provide meaningfulfeedback”

Lesser Black Magic (LBM)

“language by which [the Satanist] communicates with and impacts [the Objective Universe]”

“the influencing of beings, processes, or objects in the OU by the application of obscure physical or behavioral laws.”

“Applied / scientific / manipulative magic”

“the magician uses forces and features which are of the OU to accomplish his goal”

External Magick

“the use of energies [drawn ‘from the acausal’ via the ‘psyche’], directed by individual desire, tobring about changes in the causal”

“the changing of external events, circumstances or individuals in accordance withthe wishes of the sorcerer”

Military Information Support Operations (MISO)

“physical-information domain penetrating (external meme altering)

“an action creates a physical effect that […] crosses into the [information] domain”

Effects-Based Operations” (EBO)

a “combination of actions aimed at forming a specific model of behavior among friends, neutral forces, and enemies during peace, crisis, and war”

Greater Black Magic (GBM)

“language by which [the Satanist] communicates with and impacts [the Subjective Universe(s)]”

“the causing of change to occur in the SU in accordance with the will. This change in the SU may cause a similar and harmonious change in the OU.”

“focusing of the will of the creative self to adjust features of the SUs (personal and others’) to the desired state, which may or may not be ‘real’ in the OU”

“a supra-rational experience, not a logical, scientific, or artistic exercise”

Aim is “to influence large numbers of people over a long period of time, i.e. it is to influence ‘aeons’, either by altering or distorting existing forces, or creating new ones […] in order to change the evolution of man”

“is focused not on the sorcerer or her/his particular aims, but rather on the creating widespread (perhaps memetic) change on a social scale”

“enable individuals tofulfil their potential, evolve to become like gods and so on. […] the goals are seen as long term – of centuries of more. The aim […] is to increase the number of genuine Satanic Adepts, and to provide changes which enable this.”

Psychological Operations (PSYOP)

cognitive-information domain penetrating (internal meme altering)

“an action [taken by a state actor after going through a cognitive domain decision-making process] creates a physical effect that somehow crosses into the cognitive domain [of targeted populations], as an indirect effect”

Effectiveness can only be calculated, measured, or observed insofar as it is reflected in the physical and information domains

Black Magic

“the language by which [the Satanist] communicates with and impacts upon all else”

there is “no turning back”

Black Magick

“an act of defiance against the restrictionsimposed by the mediocre and the cowards”

practitioners “might bring you to the notice of the Intelligence Services” [X]

Black Operations/Black Ops

“Clandestine or covert operations not attributable to the organization carrying them out” [X]

Surreptitious: “kept secret, especially because it would not be approved of” [X]

As we can see in the table, the dynamics of Net-Centric Warfare are very much akin to those of “black magic”.

Firstly, the framework within which the psychological manipulation/black magic is posited to occur is similar. The elaboration of a trinity of “domains” in Net-Centric Warfare theory corresponds to a trinity of “universes”, “worlds”, or “realms” which are elaborated upon in the literature of the modern Satanic movement. Recall that the Net-Centric Warfare trinity of domains is in actuality a Cartesian duality between the physical domain and the cognitive domain. This dualism is paralleled by the Satanic cults, which call these two domains the “objective universe” or the “causal world” and the “subjective universe” or the “acausal world”. Like Net-Centric Warfare, they also posit some kind of mechanism for the transcendence of these two poles, the two fundamental domains/universes/worlds. In the case of Net-Centric Warfare, this intermediary is the “information domain”, while the Temple of Set refers to a “Magical Link” between the physical domain and the cognitive domain, and the Order of Nine Angles meanwhile calls this interstice the “gate”, “nexion”, or, alternatively, “The Abyss”—a Crowleyan trope which has worked its way into the Satanic discourses of late-stage capitalism, along with the related idiomatic phrase “to cross the abyss”.

What is the pertinence of this notion of “crossing the abyss” to Net-Centric Warfare?

The goal of the practitioner of Net-Centric Warfare is to “cross the abyss” between the physical domain and the cognitive domain and vice versa. First, it is the awareness in the cognitive domain of U.S. militarist which acquaints him with knowledge of his will, which is to conserve and expand his physical dominance over the modern imperialist order via the military industrial complex. Then, and still in the cognitive domain, this awareness of his desire/will informs a decision-making process which results in the U.S. militarist selecting the course of action most likely to lead to best rates of non-threatening meme replication. The memes he desires to cultivate are non-threatening to him because they diminish and eradicate awareness in non-militarist cognitive domains of the need to abolish the U.S. war machine and militarism. Thus the will of the militarist crosses the abyss from his cognitive domain into the physical domain when it is enacted through cognitively-determined physical action. It is generally thought that the physical domain tends to influence or determine the cognitive domain to a much greater extent than the latter determines the former, thus with “proper” management of the physical-information domain, where external memes or “e-memes” reside, the cognitive domain of the civilian population can be determined by the will of the U.S. militarist—the consciousness and will of the civilian populace will align with U.S. military interests as the U.S. militarist engineered e-memes cross the abyss and become internal memes or “i-memes” in the civilian cognitive domain.

Mao Tse-tung problematized these dynamics in On Contradiction(1937), where he evoked the impact of the “mental on material things”:

When the superstructure (politics, culture, etc.) obstructs the development of the economic base, political and cultural changes become principal and decisive. Are we going against materialism when we say this? No. The reason is that while we recognize that in the general development of history the material determines the mental and social being determines social consciousness,we also—and indeed must—recognize the reaction of mental on material things, of social consciousness on social being and of the superstructure on the economic base. This does not go against materialism; on the contrary, it avoids mechanical materialism and firmly upholds dialectical materialism.

Crossing the Abyss also happened to be the name of a white supremacist journal written by members of a hate group called the White Order of Thule which was widely circulated in U.S. prisons [Christiansen, p. 40]. The FBI has acknowledged that street and prison-based white supremacist criminal organizations operate in every branch of the U.S. military [X]. Net-Centric Warfare’s revelling in the notion that the socio-economic class configuration of physical dominance can, despite the inherently alienating and revolting character of capitalist society which leads naturally to the persistence “enemy” ideas, perpetuate itself virtually indefinitely through the willed engineering and “force multiplication” of information packages and policing the information “nexion” echoes the theses of Ragnar Redbeard in Might is Right as well as Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium, pillars of the ultra-reactionary ideological program of the White Order of Thule, publishers of Crossing the Abyss [X].

Next we must examine more closely black magic itself. Both the Satanic cults under study uphold the existence of three different kinds of magic. For Aquino, the first kind is “Lesser Black Magic”, which he basically defines as a person’s ability to manipulate objects, or the objective behaviors of other subjects in the world around them, and doesn’t seem to involve anything particularly supernatural, other than a vague allusion to “obscure physical laws”. The ONA literature refers to that which Aquino calls “Lesser Black Magic” as “External Magick”, and defines it in such a way that the two are virtually indistinguishable from each other. At some point, Aquino likens “Lesser Black Magic” to the phenomenon of reciprocal influence which Freud alluded to above. Thus it is in keeping with the perspective that Satanism is a mere implement, and a universal one at that, rather than evil in and of itself (which he shares with the ONA) that Aquino stakes out the claim that “everyone in the world is practicing [Lesser Black Magic] on everyone else, usually unconsciously and usually extremely unskillfully”.

And it is with clear implications for his MindWar concept that Aquino notes:

[Lesser Black Magic] is also a useful technique in mass situations. The governing principle remains the same: to impel behavior at the subconscious level, to control people without their realizing how or why they are being controlled.

Here we have Aquino explicitly conceptualizing MindWar/Net-Centric Warfare as a form of black magic. “Lesser Black Magic” or “External Magick” can especially be likened to what U.S. militarists call “Military Information Support Operations (MISO)”, which have in turn been closely associated with the idea of “Psychological Operations (PSYOP)”, although we might distinguish MISO from PSYOP in that MISO implies a lesser degree of “focus upon and glorification of the psyche”, targeting the physical domain and the external information domain (e-memes) as opposed to the cognitive domain and the internal information domain (i-memes).

Also compare Aquino’s description of the applicability of “Lesser Black Magic” to “mass situations” with Smith on “Effects-Based Operations”:

The main content of all “net-centric wars” consists of “effects-based operations” (EBO). This is the most important concept in the entire net-centric warfare theory developed in the US. EBO are defined by US specialists as a “combination of actions aimed at forming a specific model of behavior among friends, neutral forces, and enemies during peace, crisis, and war.”

The second type of black magic according to proponents of Satanic cultism is a more “mystical” type which Aquino calls “Greater Black Magic” and which Myatt calls “Internal Magick”. This is the only “esoteric” cult terminology under study here that does not seem to have a neat corollary in U.S. militarist jargon, although it could be likened to the way in which the soldier introspects after committing war crimes. By not becoming a conscientious objector despite taking part in a mass murdering organization, the soldier’s “subjective universe” or “acausal world” edges closer to “The Abyss” of suicide, now the leading cause of U.S. militarist deaths.

Both the Temple of Set and the Order of Nine Angles also propose a third type of magic which can be likened to PSYOPs in that it synthesizes the concern with the “mystical”, non-observable cognitive domain with the more mundane, “observable” physical domain and focuses on the interplay between them. The Temple of Set calls its third type of magic “Medial Black Magic”; medial in the sense that it is in between the “Lesser” and “Greater” varieties, combining (1) the former’s concern with changing the “objective universe”/“physical domain” in accordance with the Satanist/U.S. militarist’s desire, with (2) the latter’s concern with expanding one’s mind beyond the conventional plebeian’s moral concerns about “right” and “wrong”, “good” and “evil” through Satanic ritual (becoming god-like by extricating one’s own individualist subjectivity from all other collectivism-tinged influences). The ONA’s “Aeonic Magick” is quite similar to “Medial Black Magic” in that it deals with the Satanist’s desire to self-deify or become god-like by influencing the course of human society long beyond one’s own “causal”/“physical”/“objective” lifetime, which involves efforts to “influence large numbers of people” with a long-term timeframe in mind. PSYOPs like the “Message Force Multipliers” do this by promoting memes (i.e. units of information) that, as an ensemble contribute to the construction of a general public perception about the “War on Terror”/“New Thirty Years’ War” that is desirable from the point of view of the bourgeoisie as it seeks to “[alter] or [distort] existing forces” in late-stage capitalist society but also “[create] new ones” which assure the project for the new U.S. militarist “aeon”.

The exaggerated difference of “aeonic” vision between the two Satanic cults parallels that between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in that Aquino is more Clintonian in the way he, on the surface, repudiates openly white supremacist movements and tries to dissociate his cult’s image from Nazism (despite having clearly flirted with it [see Wewelsburg castle incident where Aquino held a Satanic ritual and founded the “Order of the Trapezoid” at the former SS-cult site] and in practice recruited neo-Nazis, like Bolton) and seems more favorable to harnessing the existing force of U.S. neoliberalism with MindWar. On the other hand, the Order of Nine Angles is more Trumpian in the way that it embraces Nazism and the pseudo-“revolutionary” nationalist reaction to “globalism” which pretends that it is a “revolution” to stage a violent coup d’etat in which a reactionary element within the ruling class which favors closed borders and trade protectionism mobilizes mass petit bourgeois disdain against the progressive element of the ruling class which favors open borders and free trade by sublimating the impetus to address the root cause of the disease (discontent caused by the capitalist system) into addressing merely some of the symptoms or consequences of capitalist state management (such as deindustrialization, labor and capital migration flows), thus aiding the cause of counterrevolution by preserving class society. The sublimation of class conflict into a Spengler-inspired culture war between the “Faustian” and “Magian” elements allows figures such as Trump to seem superficially “revolutionary” while in actuality halting revolutionary movement, which is socialist movement from primitive communism back towards communism albeit in a different, advanced form, not fascist movement from liberal capitalism back towards semi-feudalism.

Another memetic correspondence (that’s to say, a similarity in theoretical understanding of mental content) between U.S. militarist discourse and that of neo-Nazi Satanism is revealed in their shared conception of units of information (memes) as living entities which are created after intangible feelings and perceptions render themselves tangible by entering the physical-information domain (in effect, through inter-dimensional travel). As Alberts (2001) argues in Understanding Information Age Warfare that information “lives” in the information domain, so the Order of Nine Angles argues that “once an image or idea is born by magick through the desire of an individual it will, if possessed of sufficient magickal energy at its birth, spread via the acausal to the minds of other individuals and generally becomes a form of living entity”.

Computer scientist and digital culture critic Jaron Lanier (whose work will be revisited below) has challenged this tendency to anthropomorphize information/memes, describing it as characteristic of a group he calls “cybernetic totalists” (perhaps an apt name for Net-Centric Warfare practitioners):

Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it’s even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not? [X]

Finally, there is the notion of “black operations” or “black ops” which is key to Net-Centric Warfare and which has an obvious parallel in the term “black magic”. The Satanic discourse of the ONA defines “genuine Black Magick” as “act[s] of defiance against the restrictions imposed by the mediocre and the cowards”. Thus it is no hyperbole to say that U.S. militarists practice black magick when they target U.S. citizens with PSYOP programs in defiance of the legal restrictions against this practice.

Given the apparent compatibility of theoretical models and overlap of personnel between U.S. militarism and the late modern Satanist movement, which parallels the closeness between British colonialism and the rise of the early modern Western esoteric movement in the cultural misappropriation by figures such as Crowley and Blavatsky of aspects of religions and mythologies indigenous to North Africa and South Asia (consider also that David Myatt was born in British colonial Africa), we might question whether, rather than exploring “Net-Centric Warfare as black magic”, it might actually make more sense to interrogate “black magic” as a construct (an engineered meme) of imperialism and U.S. militarism in particular. Here it becomes a question of which came first: the chicken or the egg?

Conclusions

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

— Karl Marx in The German Ideology (1845)

“Developing and leveraging information superiority” by means such as “memetic engineering” and “weaponizing cultural viruses” towards the ends of achieving “information dominance” (i.e. cognitive dominance) are just a few examples of the new idiom spoken the U.S. military industrial complex. This vocabulary has been developed in a conscious effort to refine the same process by which physical dominance via the capitalist state and its constituent “special bodies of armed men” translates into domination of the cognitive domain of subaltern humans by their ruling class “betters” which Marx described one hundred and seventy-one years ago.

Hillary Clinton and the U.S. ruling class support financial investment in Net-Centric Warfare with the expectation of dividends, believing that the forcible penetration of our cognitive apparatuses by a material reality which has been manipulated to impel behaviors favorable to the achievement of U.S. ruling class objectives will generate profit. The same investments have yielded returns such as MindWar, Meme War, PSYOP, and a variety of other right-wing militarist acronyms and buzz phrases. It is only natural that the opponent of imperialist war and militarism would regard these with the utmost suspicion. This wariness might arise not only from the origins of these terms but also from their appropriation by prominent white supremacists such as the Alt-Right and bigoted right-wing conspiracist outlets such as Alex Jones’ InfoWars.

But what if Net-Centric Warfare is, in itself, neutral—a weapon or a tool which can be picked up and used for either “noble or ignoble” ends? Is it not tempting to believe that perhaps if the Left were simply to hone its meme-engineering skills and produce the correct meme(s), it/they will catch on, almost like magic? Why couldn’t the Left appropriate it and wage its own net-centric counteroffensive against the abysmal memes of the reactionary cloud?

Unfortunately, the “fittest memes” thrive not because they are more innately suitable to mimicry, but because they emanate from the ruling material force of society, which seeks to dominate all pivotal information-sharing networks. The etymology of the word “meme” implies that memes are, by definition, received ideas. Through mimesis, the status quo (of exploitation founded upon class distinctions) reproduces itself. Innovations to the capitalist system like financialization and globalization serve mimesis because they reproduce capitalism, while communist revolution brings forth authentic innovation in that it does not serve the reproduction of classes and exploitation—it entails rupture with these. (Capitalism was itself a memetic innovation on feudalism as opposed to a revolutionary rupture in the real sense, insofar as bourgeois-democratic “revolutions” merely re-configured the dynamics of exploitation by class). What seems innovative in the net-centric approach is on the engineering side of the operation, while the memetic side is imitational. The engineer is the active subject, while the target’s cognitive apparatus is objectified, reducing the mind to a passive physical vessel which becomes infected by outside ideas and units of information (memes), themselves conceptualized as the living entities. The objectified cognitive apparatus is merely the host for the meme subject, which travels via networks.

The preceding exposition of Net-Centric Warfare has revealed that, like black magic, it is orientated towards the internal manipulation of receivers by the emitters/broadcasters. Something about this paradigm does not sit right, and is incompatible with an egalitarian approach which centers on inter-subjectivity. (Although this last formulation may be oxymoronic since inter-subjectivity supposes a multiplicity of centers, lacking thus any intrinsic “center”). Network-centricism, while ostensibly valorizing inter-subjectivity, in fact devalues it, promoting instead an attitude of subject-object manipulation. More precisely, this approach is actually subjectified object-objectified subject manipulation (in that, in the topsy-turvy world of Net-Centric Warfare, information is considered to be “alive” and the targeted cognitive apparatus is considered to be determinable).

These contrastive attitudinal orientations (inter-subjectivity v. subject-object manipulation) correspond to egalitarian and hierarchical modes of thought and behavior. The hierarchical mode of Net-Centric Warfare is witnessed in its arborescent schema—the cognitive domain of the U.S. militarist MindWar technician or PSYOPS engineer represents the underground, occult roots of the “the tree”, whose trunk corresponds to the physical-information domain and is memetically determined by their engineering effort. Branches reach out from the trunk of the tree into the collective cognitive domain of the members of the populace, who are plugged into the network interface of the meme-implanting tree. For Deleuze and Guattari, “All of the logic of the tree is a logic of calque and reproduction […] The tree articulates and organizes calques into a hierarchy, the calques are like the leaves of the tree” [X, p. 20]. (Cf. the “Tree of Wyrd” employed by the Order of Nine Angles, another [ironic] case of calque, a mashup and imitation of the “Septenary” of Theosophy with the “Tree of Life” or Sephirot from Kabbalah which has been altered enough to fit into an anti-Semitic form of mysticism. The Order of Nine Angsty neo-Nazis claims of course to have culturally misappropriated only Judenrein texts and artifacts from “ancient sources that are Hellenic, Arabic, Persian, and Indic” [X, p. 27]). If the tree is hierarchy and “filiation”, then the rhizome is said to represent “alliance” [X, p. 36]. The rhizome concept could thus provide a possible starting point for considering revolutionary alternatives to Net-Centric and Memetic Warfare.

The danger of buying into militarist doctrines like “net-centric operations” and “meme warfare” lies in the implicit worldview bourgeoisification which doing so necessarily entails. The fact that theories of net-centric operations and meme war are presented as objective scientific descriptions of the dynamics of warfighting and not as political arguments per se augments the temptation to adopt these principles. They are, however, anything but neutral. Their implicit promotion of the subject-object (or subject-objectified subject) manipulation attitude is a prime demonstration of this, and a good reason to be wary of them.

Let us recall that, for PSYOP officer Aquino, the idea of MindWar was this: “Essentially you overwhelm your enemy with argument”. And, “[You explain] and [emphasize] to [your] people the rationale for [your] national interest in a specific war”. But what if you didn’t need to present people with arguments to compel them to think or behave according to your wishes? The reality of this possibility is confirmed by computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who writes in You Are Not a Gadget(2010), “We [technologists] tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument”.

Once you begin to model your thought (and therefore your action) along the lines set out by U.S. militarists, whether you do so using the lexicon of Memetic/Net-Centric Warfare or that of a Satanic cult, you have succumbed to a form of mental colonization not dissimilar to what Lanier calls “the process of lock-in”. Lanier uses this expression to refer to the way in which software transforms the subjective worldview of the programmer into what the user of that software perceives as an objective cyber-world. Lanier compares “the process of lock-in” to “a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality”. Adopting Net-Centric Warfare-esque or memeticist thinking has a similar constricting effect.

The fact that net-centric operations—especially when considered in the broader sense in which their (pseudo[?]-)demilitarized applications impact ongoing cultural development such as through that series of net-centric operations called the “world wide web”—have fomented new and “innovative” forms of fascist reaction (e.g. the meme-centric Alt-Right) cannot be overlooked, and there is something to be said for the argument that the current configuration of this increasingly commercialized network also inclines it towards political reaction.

If we consider the notion of “Web 2.0”, one of the most, if not perhaps the single most increasingly pivotal element of the information domain which Net-Centric Warfare practitioners seek to dominate, as a meta-meme in and of itself, we see that it functions like an operating system which reduces the capacity for critical thought by promoting:

(1) the user-generated meme-upvote-downvote construct as the predominant information domain interface which the internet-accessing masses encounter, combining encouragement of reactionism, passivity, and non-creative deferment to the hive mind with the illusion of participatory empowerment,

and (3) “memetic engineering” as the reserve of ruling class media moguls, monopolizing “first-order expression” (i.e. the sort of expression which “presents a whole, […] that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic[, and is] genuinely new in the world” [Lanier, p. 82].

The big social media and social networking platforms may be considered higher order, engineered memes, while the user or “community” member, may be considered to engage in meme-splicing when they generate “original” content, in that they connect and weave their micro-meme into the fabric of the pre-existing higher order meme, although one may be hard-pressed to qualify many of the micro-memes as “genuinely new”; each one is simply another post, tweet, update, etc. barely distinguishable from the others. Still, the interface encourages the bulk of user activity to remain passive (lurking, scrolling) and reactive (liking, favoriting, retweeting, upvoting).

Much of Lanier’s previously cited book is dedicated to criticizing “cybernetic totalists”—a name he uses to describe “one subculture of technologists [which] has recently become more influential than the others”. According to Lanier, the capital of “cybernetic totalism” is the Silicon Valley, whence was spawned a new “digital culture” whose “central mistake […] is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that [it ends] up with a mush,” lifting up “the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless”.

Lanier also unpacks the quasi-religious, eschatological character of these technologists’ transhumanist belief that the noosphere, the collectively harnessed power of individual human consciousnesses, will one day form an immortal Singularity or that the internet itself will develop its own god-like consciousness, echoing a common theme which we have already covered here.

Furthermore, it is this subculture’s penchant for anonymous trolling and the hive mind concept which leads Lanier to believe that “with millions of people connected through a medium that sometimes brings out their worst tendencies, massive, fascist-style mobs could rise up suddenly”.

Developments in the 2010s have proven that last piece of speculation, about the potentially menacing real world implications of “cybernetic totalism”, somewhat premonitory, such as when misogynistic users of the Web 2.0 platform “4chan” began cheerleading and encouraging mass shootings in 2012 [X]. The year 2016, with the marriage between digital meme culture and neo-Nazism seen in the rise of the Alt-Right to mainstream prominence, also seems to bring us closer to realization of Lanier’s 2010 speculation about embryonic Silicon Valley-inspired fascist mobs.

An antifascist writer by the name of Josephine Armistead provided in mid-2016 a relevant overview and analysis of the roots and emergence of this new breed of Information Age fascism identified with “neo-reaction, or ‘NRx’” as well as the Alt-Right in “The Silicon Ideology” (2016). Armistead concludes the report with the recommendation that “neo-reactionaries must be fought on their own ground (the internet), and with their own tactics”. But given that their tactics include things like “meme magick”, we might take this recommendation, at least in part, with a grain of salt.

Digital meme culture is not particularly conducive to the preeminence of critical thought. If it was, it would not have devolved into far right mysticism. It is rather conducive to the preeminence of calque and imitation. It is a branch sapping from the sickly tree of Net-Centric Warfare. We cannot be sure what or who exactly are at the roots of this tree, though it might well be folks like Michael Aquino and Paul Valley. Hives hang from the branches of this tree. Jaron Lanier is of the belief that “we will only escape” the imitative and second-rate cultural production of the memetic zeitgeist “when we kill the hive”. But what if the whole damn tree is rotten?

Liberation demands that we assault not just the bad “reactionary memes”, but the pseudoscience of memetics itself. The attitude of subject-object manipulation is anathema to revolutionary movement-building. The subaltern force of society will become the ruling one not because a radical hive mind spawned a vanguard cloud of “dank commie memes” which infected the minds of the proletarian masses, nor because it sufficiently “downvoted” reactionary memes, but because it overcame the meme-upvote-downvote construct. The revolution will not be memeticized.

A Critique of the Pro-Sino-Russian “Anti-imperialism” Trend in the USA and Western Europe, or Part I of a response to “Position paper from Red Guards Austin, 2016”

By Daniel K. Buntovnik

17 July 2016

The appearance of new political centers for the advocacy and advancement of Marxian revolutionism in the United States is a good thing. It would, however, be unreasonable to suppose that any one of these centers is infallible, no matter how grounded in the “science” of whatever “-ism” it pretends to be. Revolutionary agitators, organizers, and educators should avoid the pitfalls of sectarianism and provincial-particularism-cum-universalism by remaining open to the ideas emitted by a panoply of political centers (which need not necessarily be constituted by sects), moving in this way towards a decolonial transmodern pluriversalism as an authentic universalism. The potential mass organization of futurity operating on a genuine democratic centralism need not conceptualize its constituent political centers as tentacle-like “branches” sprouting from the sectarian center of one metropolitan province, but as disparate centers, autonomous in and of themselves, which link up, like the social individuals who exercise agency in coming together to take part in the formation of a collective, even though they may not have been previously “related” in the mundane sense.

It is in this spirit of critical open-mindedness that I received some of the criticisms of American left-wing activist groups that a Maoist-oriented organization based in Austin, Texas and calling itself the “Red Guards” after the eponymous Red Guards of 1960s China made in their 2016 position paper “Condemned to Win!”. What follows are some of my reflections on what they put forward in that paper, which serves also as a launch pad to further elaborations.

Allegations of bogus “anti-imperialist” posturing

The author(s) of “Condemned to Win!” see as problematic a trend they identify among the formally organized leftist groups in the United States (and beyond) in the form of a vulgar anti-imperialism which they call “alternative-imperialism”. They argue that one “cannot be an anti-imperialist and at the same time be a running dog for Russian or Chinese imperialism.” Others have argued exactly the opposite. For example, that there is at the present moment no such thing as Russian imperialism and that you cannot oppose imperialism without standing in solidarity with certain key policies of the government of the Russian Federation [X, X]. Before we can evaluate both lines of argumentation about how we are to oppose imperialism and come to a sound conclusion as to which one, if any, is correct, we must first consider what imperialism is, what its essential features are today, and how developments in imperial systems over the course of the last one-hundred years which have passed since the “classical” Marxian theorists first described modern imperialism might change our orientation towards it.

A brief overview of “imperialism” and its development

Human societies have been confronted by something we might call “imperialism” (the system of empire) for thousands of years. However, it wasn’t until the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries that a number of political theorists (the “classical” Marxians) began to elaborate analyses of a new form of imperialism that was qualitatively different from that of Imperium Romanum or Manden Kurufaba. Whereas in those ancient and medieval empires, outgrowths of the earliest agricultural class societies, the basic schematic elements of imperialism (the amassing of wealth and privilege by members of one class and/or polity to the detriment of others, combined with an expansionist thrust) could be found in practices of conquest, colonization, enslavement, tribute collection, and vassalage, the arrival of modernity signalled the beginning of a long process of progressively layering new features onto the imperial schema, as well as transforming or discarding some of the old.

While the embryonic capitalism of the first modern empires arising around the 15th century CE preserved many of the trappings of the older class system of feudalism, such as the continued predominance of artisanal and handicraft-type manufacturing, their distinctive novelty was in the emergence of a wealthy and powerful merchant class associated to a large extent with the transatlantic triangular trade.

A middle phase of capitalism seemed to be inaugurated when these empires underwent industrial revolutions and holders of capital in the form of “large-scale machine industry” (prefigured by those plantation-capitalists who made factories out of the land and machines out of human beings) became the principal basis for an imperialist power elite. In this middle phase of empire (safeguarding some of its predecessor’s traits as had its predecessor kept some of those of the system preceding it), factories, mills, and industrialization were concentrated more densely in the imperial “core” or “metropolitan” countries, the objective being to plunder resources and raw material from the “savage” peripheries, refine/assemble/upgrade them into more valuable finished products with “civilized” know-how, and sell them back in the colonies at a profit, fulfilling in this way a little bit of the mission civilisatrice through commodification and exports.

But by the “late stage” of capitalism, which we seem to still be stuck in and which had already begun to take shape by the time the classical analysts of modern imperialism produced their theories, new developments in the financial sector signalled another shift; the financier, the rentier, the investor, the banker, the holder of a more abstract and vertically concentratible form of wealth called finance capital began to supersede the robber baron industrialist of yesteryear as the archetypal representative of the power brokering imperialist class.

It is the superior vertical concentratibility of wealth permitted by financialization which allows modern imperialists, in what would seem a paradox to those of olden days, to “[exploit] inequalities in the world economy” by outsourcing industrial capital to poor (“Third World”) semi-peripheral to peripheral countries—dismantling their factories and mills at the heart of “civilization”, setting up shop in places where labor is sold at a fraction of the cost—and importing the manufactured goods to the core (at an immense rate of profit to the core-based financier, of course). And though the (super)exploitation is palpable, these imperialist profiteers claim to be doing a favor to those neocolonial countries by providing them with “more jobs”. The industrial core becomes the rust-belt, and “hard work pays off” becomes more jobs, more poverty.

It is the topsy-turviness of this stage in which “certain of [capitalism’s] fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites” that Vladimir Lenin identified as being at the essence of modern capitalist imperialism. Another important inversion of capitalism’s fundamental characteristics, one identified by Lenin, is the transition from free competition to monopoly; that is, the lessening of competition, the greater concentration of power in lesser numbers of hands. Ironically, apologists for today’s monopoly capitalism defend this system by barking about mythical “free markets” at the mere insinuation that trust-busting state intervention might threaten to undermine their rate of return investment.

The newest imperialist phase

Lenin described imperialism as the transition from “free competition” to “monopoly” in 1916, one-hundred years ago. To what extent has monopolization progressed since then?

Answering the question of whether or not monopoly capitalism has progressed to such an extent that we face before us now a form of imperialism (call it “unipolar imperialism”) in which Empire is axed around a unique central core—a monopole—centered in the United States, perhaps on Wall Street, is paramount to determining whether or not it is anti-imperialist to rally behind the proverbial barricades of pro-Russian and pro-Chinese forces as they make their stand against American Empire. Clearly the United States played a hegemonic role in world affairs throughout much of the last two (maybe even three) centuries and it has continued to play that role throughout this century. It is the dominant great power in the world today in terms of military, economic, political, and perhaps pop-cultural force… the top dog, so to speak. But is it the only great power capable of contesting international hegemony? The only dog in the fight for monopolization?

In “The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital”, University of Oregon sociology professor and Monthly Review magazine editorJohn Bellamy Foster identifies three key “classical” Marxian analyses of imperialism: Bukharin’s Imperialism and the World Economy (1916); Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913); and Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Foster argues that these analyses “were responses to a period of international instability, marked by the decline of Britain as the hegemonic power in the world economy and the rise of competing nations, particularly Germany and the United States, leading in the ensuing struggles to the First and Second World Wars” [X]. Thus the imperialism which they grappled with was clearly multipolar in nature, emanating from more than one center. Indeed, for Lenin, “an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony”. Lenin also noted that, despite monopolization being a trend towards severely reduced free competition, monopolies nevertheless “do not eliminate [free competition], but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts” [X].

Foster also suggests that there is now a ubiquitous belief among leftists that “the world has entered a new imperialist phase” which “is widely referred to as neoliberal globalization”. Given that many of the theorists of this 21st century phase of imperialism highlight major differences from the classical Marxian theory of imperialism outlined by thinkers like Lenin, key among these differences being the shift from multipolarity to unipolarity, a new name is needed. If “imperialism” was the stage of capitalism described by Lenin in which inter-great power rivalry and conflict was “an essential feature”, and if today capitalism is essentially different in that it has reached a stage where such rivalry is non-existent, giving way in its stead to a unilateral global assault by fascistic Empire, we must give this stage a name to distinguish it from the fundamentally dissimilar stage described by Lenin and other classical Marxians a hundred years ago.

Theories of “super-imperialist” neoliberal globalization

Some (e.g. Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, William Robinson, and Leslie Sklair) see the latest stage of capitalism (neoliberal globalization) as being led by a deterritorialized and/or transnational state entity one might name simply “Empire”; not centered in any one nation-state but represented by multinational corporations and privately contracted security/mercenary/intelligence firms, much of its wealth is hidden away in offshore accounts, only a fraction of which was revealed by the Panama Papers. Foster further relates that Robinson’s idea that “globalization involves a supersession of the nation-state as the organizing principle of social life under capitalism” is said by Ernesto Screpanti, another 21st century imperialism theorist, to be the approach “that today most nearly replicates the outlook of Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism”. (Kautsky, a German Marxist leader and contemporary of Lenin, forewarned at the beginning of the 20th century of a coming imperialist phase in which “the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capitals” would take place. Lenin mocked this theory as “notorious” [ibid] and “ultra-nonsense”).

Others (e.g. Michael Hudson, Peter Gowan, Leo Panitch, and Sam Gindin) make the case that neoliberal globalization represents the ascendency of a quasi-“all powerful” American Empire which dispossesses all other empires. In this analysis, Europe and Japan have become wholly-owned subsidiaries of American Empire. These theorists call the current stage of capitalism “super-imperialism”, a term which Lenin also used a synonym for Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism.

What both of the theories of neoliberal globalization described above seem to share is their acceptance of “end of history”-style narratives of the post-Cold War era. While the first emphasizes the beginning of inter-imperialist co-operation—the deterritorialized ultra-imperialist Empire is made possible through capitalists’ class conscious realization that transcending the obsolete form of the nation-state will lift impediments on their ability to accumulate wealth via multinational corporations, the second theory posits the end of inter-imperialist conflict through American Empire’s victory over great power rivals Germany and Japan in two world wars, further cemented in place by the apparent defeat of Communism seen in the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, political revolutions and coups in Eastern Europe, the disestablishment of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, and the defeat of Central American national liberation movements. Nevertheless, the theory of deterritorialized transnational Empire, although many elements of it resonate, seems, for now, to fit better on the pages of sci-fi books than in objective analyses of the dynamics of imperialism in the present, for who can deny that the division of the world into nation-states continues to be very real and significant? Whoever denies this has surely never travelled across any international border that is not between the US and Canada or outside of the Schengen Zone. Foster’s essay further points to the fact that although the “reach [of multinational corporations] is global[,] their property and their owners have a clear national base”. It is the second theory of neoliberal globalization, that which posits it as the project of a uniquely American “super-imperialism”, that seems to justify the pro-Russian/Chinese position, and which needs unpacked.

SUPEREMPIRE?

Sino-Russian regroupment against neoliberal globalization?

With the exit of the Soviet Union from the world stage, why are the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation increasingly paired in any informed discussion of 21st century global geopolitics? How was this rapprochement possible after the outright disavowal of Marxian ideals by Russia’s post-Soviet political system (ideals which are still paid lip service by the Chinese leadership), given the legacy of the three decades long Sino-Soviet split, born from the Chinese Communist perception that the Soviet Russian Communists were revisionist traitors to the cause, “bent on seeking Soviet-U.S. co-operation for the domination of the world”?

In parallel to the emergence of a new scheme to implement a US expansionist drive on the global level at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st (in large part dependent upon the discovery/construction of NATO’s new raison d’être: “radical Islamism”, perhaps with Russian containment coming in a close second), notoriously outlined by the think tank “Project for the New American Century”, Sino-Russian rapprochement took shape through the foundation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a political, economic, and military alliance between China, Russia, and several Central Asian states, which is on course to expand and incorporate several other states in the near future, including India and Pakistan as soon as this summer (putting China in the awkward position of being in alliance with a capitalist state’s decades long fight against Maoist rebels), as well as Iran, Belarus, and Mongolia. This realignment of great powers was a sure sign that the predicted era of global unity and long-lasting peace founded on the evolutionary plateau of “liberal free market democracy” heralded by Fukuyama after the disintegration of the Soviet Union was an illusion. Furthermore, the fact that both of these strategic initiatives (the “Project for the New American Century” and the Sino-Russian regroupment) essentially occurred in tandem indicates that, rather than one initiative being purely reactive to the other, the bourgeoisies of each great power were simply following the imperial logic of carrying out the struggle for international hegemony.

But the ideological basis of this supposed “anti-Empire alliance” has nothing to do with any kind of Marxian class conscious objection to the underlying logic of late stage capitalist development. The “anti-super-imperialists” demonstrate a willingness to overlook the Sino-Russian national bourgeois leadership at the heart of appeals to the possibility of a “dollar-free and independent economy and market” through SCO-led “anti-super-imperialism” as an alternative to neoliberal globalization. The underlying suggestion here is that, with the right balance of power between global bourgeois forces, fairer and freer conditions can be won under capitalism which would put some wind in the sails of the working class movement. These “super-imperialism” analyses posit the national bourgeoisies of Russia and China as classes who unconsciously advance the movement towards socialist revolution.

Even if one does accept the premise that the SCO represents strictly an oppositional bloc to Empire, that is, the theory of “super-imperialism” as the end of inter-imperial rivalry through the arrival of an all-powerful US-led Empire on the world stage, this nevertheless downplays the presence of tension between the United States and its imperial allies and the possibility of rising antagonisms in those relationships. A variety of these antagonisms can be identified: American policymakers have openly discussed plots to “[take] the Saudi out of Arabia”, replacing the House of Saud with “the Hashemite monarchy that now rules Jordan”. Another example would be a leaked phone call that revealed antagonism between the US and EU with regard to the Ukraine conflict, with the Assistant Secretary of State telling the US Ambassador to the Ukraine, “Fuck the EU.”

A modest decline in US imperialism’s ability to enforce policy objectives through brute militarism seems to be evidenced by two key trends. First, there is the fact that another quasi-unilaterally US-implemented “coalition of the willing”-style invasion à la Iraq and Afghanistan seems increasingly unfeasible as it would be incredibly unpopular and likely lead to an undesirable backlash for the US bourgeoisie. Secondly, there are also signs of Europe and Japan emerging as independent imperial militarist centers. Top EU officials have called for the formation an EU military force. German leaders have recently discussed the need to amend their country’s constitution to allow for leeway in military adventures in Iraq [X, X], while Japan has in the last year lifted constitutional restrictions preventing its military from carrying out overseas assaults [X]. The Japanese government is also fostering its own military-academic industrial complex by directing universities to abolish social science and humanities departments and move towards weapons research, including notably weaponized robotics research.

For subjects in the heart of American Empire who desire to see the defeat of capitalist neoliberal globalization and the wars and neocolonial occupations that go along with it, it is of paramount importance to determine whether the material dialectic flipside of this equation is the victory of the bourgeois great powers China and Russia.

Important questions must be asked:

If revolution is not immediately feasible in the Bible-thumping heartland (much less the liberal-progressive cosmopolitan burgs) of American Empire, will the defeat of the latter at the hands of a Sino-Russian-led alliance facilitate the revolutionary movement in the core?

If the ruling capitalists in China and Russia are victorious in facilitating the unhinging of US hegemony, will this accelerate the revolutionary movements in those Eurasian countries?

Should socialists in the United States and the European Union hail the Russian social-patriotic defense of the fatherland in Donbass and Lugansk as a historically progressive struggle? And what of the Russian military intervention in Syria, ostensibly on the same side as the US military intervention?

During much of the First World War, Lenin endorsed a policy called “revolutionary defeatism”. Lenin posited revolutionary defeatism as the axiom that “during a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government”. Lenin was careful to explain that this policy of calling for the defeat of the Russian Empire did not imply a desire for “the victory of Germany” as its compliment [ibid]. Instead, it was held that “in all imperialist countries the proletariat must now desire the defeat of its own government” [ibid]. Here Lenin presents revolutionary defeatism not as the argument that German victory would be a “less evil” outcome of revolution in Russia throwing a wrench in the country’s war machine than a continued costly struggle for Russian victory and defense of the tsarist fatherland, but that Russian defeat would accelerate the revolutionary movement in Russia, making the defeat-slogan a call to defeat all imperialisms; the transformation of imperialist war into civil war would spread to Germany and “the German victory [would] be short-lived”. It was not a pro-German defeatism, but an anti-imperialist pan-defeatism. If we accept Lenin’s 1915 formulation, that proletarians of “all” imperial core areas must desire the defeat of their own government (implying that in a colonial national liberation war, proletarians do not need to wish for the defeat of their government), the answer to the questions posed above then depends on whether we see modern Russia and China as imperialist in the modern sense, a question which we will return to later.

The idea of “revolutionary defeatism” was not a new one on the Russian political scene when Lenin was writing about it in 1915. A prototype of the call for “revolutionary defeatism” was deployed by Russian revolutionaries a decade earlier, during the inter-imperialist Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. In that earlier instance however, Lenin’s explanation of what revolutionary defeatism entailed was quite different from the one he offered during the First World War. While, during the First World War, Lenin tried to distance the notion of revolutionary defeatism from formulations that “[put] the question in the form of a choice between military outcomes on the government plane”, Hal Draper argues in The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism” (1953) that Lenin was in fact guilty of doing exactly this as he deployed a lesser evilist line of argumentation for defeatism that glamorized Japanese imperialism as a progressive force during the Russo-Japanese War. Draper further shows that Soviet (Stalinist) historiography covered up this inconsistency between Lenin’s early pro-enemy nation defeatism and later pan-defeatism out of embarrassment. (Lesser evilist, pro-enemy nation defeatism being considered an error—Lenin and Trotsky split on the question of the defeat-slogan during the First World War with Lenin criticizing Trotsky’s characterization of Russian defeatism as implying a desire for German victory, a difference which the supporters of Stalin were keen to play up in an effort to discredit Trotsky as thoroughly un-Marxist-Leninist). Draper’s book makes the case that Lenin actually abandoned slogans of revolutionary defeatism after returning from exile in Switzerland after the February Revolution (in March 1917) and realizing that it was too “theoretical” and out of touch with the common people of Russia, many of whom were not chauvinistic “social patriots” but had “defensist sentiments” out of an instinctual desire to defend their country from oppression; they “[accepted] the war only as a necessity and not as an excuse for making conquests” [Lenin].

Draper points to the fact that during the 1904-1905 war, “pro-Japanism in the sense of desiring the victory of Japanese imperialism but also in the sense of ‘idealizing’ Japan as a progressive force” was commonly associated with the policy of revolutionary defeatism. He explains that “a ‘desire for defeat’, tended to merge this sentiment into its obvious consequence: a wish for the victory of Japan”. It is in an article written by Lenin in 1905, after the surprise attack on the Russian naval fleet in Manchuria, “The Fall of Port Arthur”, where he exhibits most strongly the pro-enemy nation essence of his formula for revolutionary defeatism at that time. But what was the basis for this Japanophilia?

In “The Fall of Port Arthur”, Lenin writes, “Advancing, progressive Asia has dealt backward and reactionary Europe an irreparable blow.” At that time, the Empire of Japan was undergoing rapid industrialization and modernization, developing free market capitalism following the end of sakokuisolationism. Japan was a constitutional monarchy with a House of Representatives while Russia was a semi-feudal absolutist dictatorship with no constitutional law.

Key to Lenin’s enthusiasm here for the “advancing” and “progressive” character of Japanese imperialism was the notion that Japan was at a higher stage of social development than Russia. Lenin rebuked his contemporaries who argued “that a socialist could only be in favour of a workers’ Japan, a people’s Japan, and not of a bourgeois Japan” because, this, he argued, “is as absurd as blaming a socialist for admitting the progressive nature of the free-trade bourgeoisie as compared with the protectionist bourgeoisie”.

Lenin reiterates this point several times over:

“The proletariat is hostile to every bourgeoisie and to all manifestations of the bourgeois system, but this hostility does not relieve it of the duty of distinguishing between the historically progressive and the reactionary representatives of the bourgeoisie.”

And,

“While struggling against free competition, we cannot, however, forget its progressive character in comparison with the semi-feudal system. While struggling against every war and every bourgeoisie, we must draw a clear line in our agitational work between the progressive bourgeoisie and the feudal autocracy; we must recognise the great revolutionary role of the historic war in which the Russian worker is an involuntary participant.”

If we transpose this formula for revolutionary defeatism by the progressive power which states that, when conflict arises between two bourgeois great powers, the bourgeoisie of the more socially advanced nation plays a revolutionary role in dragging forward the bourgeoisie of the backwards nation, then the 21st century “anti-imperialist” enthusiasm for the “progressiveness” of the national bourgeoisies of China and Russia quickly loses steam, because, in the Leninist schema for stages of economic development, monopoly-finance capitalism is a progressive outgrowth of free competition under industrial capitalism. If, in 1905, capitalist, constitutional Japan was more advanced than semi-feudal, autocratic Russia, then it follows that today the measure of a great power’s progressiveness is the degree to which it has developed socially by transitioning via financialization from the more primitive system of nation-state-based industrial capitalism to the “higher”, more “civilized” system of free transnational trade: neoliberal globalization.

A proponent of this view might argue that the neoliberal austerity measures implemented across the Global North in recent years are progressive in that, in globalizing poverty, cutting the social benefits/privileges found only in the wealthy countries, and dismantling the welfare states whose construction was only possible with Marshall Plan imperialist superprofits, they reduce the inflated living standards of the labor aristocratic imperial core middle class and professionalized workers and their excessive consumerism run amok. By polarizing the rich-poor divide in wealthy countries and rendering the petit bourgeois downwardly mobile (proletarianizing them), as well as trending towards multiculturalism, the revindication of postcolonial centripetal migrations of labor as a path to reparations, and the dissolution of the nation-state system, neoliberal globalization sets the stage for a globalized class struggle, wherein a super-rich global ruling class and a global poor face off in struggle relatively freed up from the hindrances of national division.

Proponents of “pro-Russian anti-imperialism” base their argument for the progressiveness of the defeat of American imperialist machinations as a whole or partial result of the strategic initiatives of the Russian bourgeoisie on the denial of Russia being imperialist. For proponents of this position, as we shall examine more closely in sections below, Russia is a non-imperialist capitalist power not because it has advanced to a higher stage of development than US capitalism, but precisely the opposite: because it is at a lower stage; privatization has not progressed as far as in the West (much of its industrial capital is state-owned) and its economy is not as financialized as that of the US. And since it is assumed that Lenin’s conclusion that it is only in imperialist countries that socialists must subscribe to defeatism is a scientific axiom, it is therefore thoroughly un-socialist to desire the defeat of capitalist, underdeveloped Russia. But if we accept the kind of pro-enemy nation defeatism espoused by Lenin during the Russo-Japanese War and its accompanying lesser evilist proposition that scientific socialists must admit “the progressive nature of the free-trade bourgeoisie as compared with the protectionist bourgeoisie”, then one is forced to uphold the American bourgeoisie as progressive as compared with the backwards Russian bourgeoisie. While the American bourgeoisie is leading negotiations for significant new free trade measures such as the TPP and T-TIP, the Russian bourgeoisie and its satellite bourgeoisies in Belarus and Kazakhstan are the most protectionist in the world [X, X]. Other SCO states, including China and India, are also world leaders in protectionism [X].

Take a step back from this economism and, on the cultural plane, the outlook for a “pro-(Sino-)Russian anti-imperialism” is not much better. Although critiques of “pink imperialism” accurately point out the shamelessness of imperial recuperation of the struggle for LGBTQIA+ liberation and the absurdity in the idea that rights for gays will come to Afghanistan via American drone campaigns, reactionary outbursts against “Gayropa” from the Russian state and Orthodox and fundamentalist Christians do not under any circumstances lend themselves to progressiveness. Western “pro-Russian anti-imperialist” lefts seem blissfully unaware, or just don’t care, that their counterparts in the East base a significant part of their case against integration into neoliberal globalization on socially conservative arguments against a culturally decadent West. In Eastern European states torn between US/EU and Russian great powers, it is the Soviet nostalgic pro-Russian “socialists” who propose laws to, in their own words, “do everything possible to stop propagation of homosexuality and the destruction of Christian values and the traditional family” [X, X].

Nevertheless, it does seem that, in slowly backing away, at first from the pro-“progressive enemy” and quasi-two-stagist narrative of revolutionary defeatism as the triumph of modern bourgeois-democratic liberal capitalist imperialism over outmoded semi-feudal autocratic capitalist imperialism in the Russo-Japanese War to the pan-defeatist calls for simultaneous revolutions in Germany and Russia (and all state participants in the inter-imperialist conflict) during the First World War, and then away from defeatism tout court after the bourgeois-democratic February Revolution to an appreciation of the “‘conscientious’ revolutionary-defensism” of the Russian masses, Lenin discretely abandoned the defeatist formula because it had become a roadblock to revolution.

So is it this “revolutionary defensist” path which allows us to transcend the binary trap of “victory or defeat” which implicitly excludes the possibility of working class leadership in its formulation of inter-capitalist conflict as a sadistic restaurant of mass slaughter where the only items on the menu are those outcomes offered by bourgeois governments? Only if the addition of a transcendental “third way” was somehow enough to everytime set us free from the trap of binary thinking. Alas, we have merely shifted to another duality: “victory or defeat” or “neither victory or defeat”. What is clear is that revolutionaries must blaze their own trails.

“All categorical options are a trap. There are not only two paths, just as there are not just two colors, two sexes, or two beliefs. The answer is neither here nor there. It is better to make a new path that goes where one wants to go.”

Revolutionaries within US Empire must assess to what extent the masses sincerely accept the “War on Terror” and its next phase which US military policymakers call “The New Thirty Years’ War” as a necessary evil—some kind of just war—and not just a cynical “excuse for making conquests”, before calculating how effective defeatist-sloganeering might be. Certainly the effects of sustained mass hysteria following 11 September 2001 must be considered. Broadcasting Twin Tower collapses on repeat was a powerful trigger for defensive instincts and amplifying perceptions of an oppressive Axis of Evil “hating us for our freedom”, but its effect may be wearing off. If such sincere defensism does still exist on a mass scale, the defeatist slogan may prove counterproductive to anti-imperialist mobilization. On the other hand, if defensism has become largely insincere, with young people joining the US military for its promises of career advancement and the chance to “see the world”, all while basically knowing full well that it is fighting for imperial hegemony and hydrocarbon conquest, then perhaps embracing desire for defeat still has its place. In that case, it is important to articulate who—what social forces—will defeat US militarism and global economic exploitation: Sino-Russian capitalists leading a new economic bloc against “Dollar Dependency” and “Debt Peonage”, low-class Westerners leading a struggle against capitalism, a combination of the two? If we opt for the first or the third, we must ask whether socialist struggle in China and Russia to defeat those nations’ bourgeoisies parallel to the low-class Westerners’ struggle undermines the SCO economic project.

Revolutionaries in Russia and China, meanwhile, are advised to determine to what extent NATO’s geostrategic war games and containment policies foster genuine sentiments of oppression among the masses there. In those places it might also be considered to what extent scaremongering about the decadence of Western culture can also be used to project class antagonism between the workers and the national and comprador bourgeoisies within those countries externally. If Russian and Chinese proletarian comrades come to the conclusion that they are indeed at the butt end of a super-imperialism, then they must determine whether antagonism and strife between them and their patriotic national bourgeoisies undermines the struggle against super-imperialism.

But it must also be clarified whether a non-super-imperialist country can still be imperialist in the sense of a lower stage of imperialism; for the Old Bolsheviks certainly did not negate in their scientific analysis that the underdeveloped Russia of 1905 was imperialist, even if it was a semi-feudal imperialism, qualitatively different from the higher stage imperialism of Japan. The Chinese and Russian revolutions, though they failed to bring about a socialist world, did fulfill the development tasks of the “bourgeois-democratic” revolution in their countries (i.e., they are no longer “semi-feudal” to any significant degree; the veneer of “socialism” was used to build monopolies through state ownership of industry).

Thus it is the supposition of “super-imperialism” (again, that is unipolar globalist imperialism—unforetold by the classical Marxians but by Kautsky) as marking a revolutionary new stage of capitalism that begs the question of whether the socialist revolution in countries poorly integrated into the super-imperial globalized system no longer faces before it the “simple” task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and instauring the socialist stage of development, but must also carry out the task of the bourgeois-globalist revolution before it can move on to the socialist and communist stages. It is this suggestion, that a unique and new historical stage of development has been reached, or is being reached by something we must call bourgeois-globalist revolution, where the revolutionary class is the transnational bourgeoisie who grows class consciousness, attacks and overthrows the reactionary national bourgeoisies and which sheds the old imperialism of its essential feature of inter-great power imperialist rivalry, which justifies the characterization of China and Russia as backwards (non-imperialist) countries. The thesis of neoliberal globalization as unipolar super-imperialism negates the old school Marxian idea that the union of peoples into a single world economic system “can only be voluntary, arising on the basis of mutual confidence and fraternal relations among peoples”. The decolonization wave of the 1960s did indeed “lead to the crisis of world capitalism” [ibid], but capitalism managed to survive this crisis by initiating the bourgeois-globalist revolution of neoliberalism, instauring a neocolonialism which seems immune to the old school national liberation movements.

The confusion of “pro-Sino-Russian anti-imperialism” is in the fact that it is reactionary against the bourgeois-globalist revolution for the wrong reasons. It opposes the globalist half of the revolution but embraces the bourgeois half. This is inherently and doubly un-socialist because the socialist revolution is, if not globalist, not socialist. Socialist revolution in the 21st century must carry out, in addition to the expropriation of the means of production, certain tasks of the bourgeois-globalist revolution associated with “supersession of the nation-state as the organizing principle of social life under capitalism” (e.g. removal of barriers to free movement of labor [passport privilege], removal of protections which sustain inequality between countries). Socialist revolution cannot and will not be led on by nationalist and protectionist bourgeois forces.

Towards a sharper critique of masquerading “anti-imperialism”

Now let us go back to the allegation of the Red Guards Austin introduced at the beginning of this essay that a trend exists among certain Western leftists to substitute opposition to American imperialism with support for alternative imperialist projects, namely Russian and Chinese.

There are varying degrees to which this trend is realized. In its mild form, opposition to imperialism downplays the imperialist ambitions (if not outright real imperialistic actions) of foreign capitalist polities engaged in self-interested resistance to the ongoing process of US-led neoliberal globalization. In its severe form, opposition to imperialism is essentially reduced to cheerleading what we might call, if not imperialist, petit-imperialist and aspiring-imperialist forces who are engaged in contests for international hegemony not with the aim to abolish exploitation or liberate countries from neocolonial subjugation, but to increase their own competitivity in global markets. No matter the severity, at the heart of this tendency is the substitution of principled revolutionary opposition to all imperialism (not only “super-imperialism”) with opportunistic enthusiasm for the weakening of one country’s imperialism at the hands of powerful capitalists from another, or a powerful coalition of capitalists from multiple others.

Vulgar anti-imperialism (anti-super-imperialism) is akin to championing the plight of mom ’n’ pop shopkeepers displaced by Wal-Mart, calling it anti-capitalism, and accusing any worker who criticizes their small business boss of being a Wal-Mart PR Rep or an ultra-leftist unwittingly undermining solidarity with the enemy against the bigger enemy. Vulgar anti-imperialism is the projection of the petit-bourgeois populism of “Main Street versus Wall Street” or “the super-rich 1% (billionaires) versus the 99% (including ‘middle class’ multi-millionaires)” onto a global scale.

A number of would-be “anti-imperialists” have appeared out of the woodwork in recent months and years to weave twisted defenses of 21st century Great-Russian “social patriotism” [X, X, X, X]. These polemics are no doubt reactionary outbursts to geopolitical developments which point towards the re-emergence of Russia as a great power in inter-capitalist competition following the brief disorientation triggered by Soviet collapse: namely, the Russian Federation’s decisions to annex the Crimean peninsula in March 2014 (first colonized by the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century and home to a strategically located Russian naval base) and to intervene militarily in Syria (also home to a strategically located Russian naval base [X]) in 2015 (still ongoing). These confused would-be opponents of imperialism deny that spacefaring, nuclear warhead-armed, expansionist [X] polities like the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China are highly advanced capitalist states, claiming that they have not yet developed monopolistic capitalism.

What happens when you discard the fact of monopoly capitalism’s essential multipolarity: the tragic case of the “hardcore anti-Germans”

An apt comparison might be made between this anti-Americanism cum anti-imperialism and a heterogenous political identity claimed by some radicals leftists in Germany known as Antideutsch(“anti-Germans”). The anti-Germans argue that German national identity has been so tainted by the legacy of the Holocaust and Nazism and that it stands as a barrier to internationalism and the struggle against capitalism. They reject the notion that the left can “rely on the German working-classes”, the vast majority of whom harbor “a deep authoritarian disposition”. One anti-German group calling itself sinistra! explains the tendency as “a radicalization of anti-national theory” whose roots go back to the First World War, when Karl Liebknecht remarked that “the most dangerous enemy is to be found in your own country”.

Where anti-Germans stand out from much of the left is in their self-declared solidarity with the state of Israel and their prioritization of the critique of antisemitism masked in anti-Zionism. But where the tendency really veers away from the vast majority of what we conceptualize as “the left” is in their embrace of Americanism. Like with the “anti-American/pro-Russian anti-imperialists”, this embrace of the “enemy” varies in degree from group to group. It is said that “all anti-Germans […] denounce anti-Americanism” because of the German heritage of Nazi resentment at American and Allied troops (and not the German left) preventing the full realization of the Final Solution which they allege occupies the core of much of Germany’s anti-Americanism.

The embrace of the myth of the “progressive enemy” in its more severe form described by the anti-German sinistra! group is not pretty:

“[S]ome anti-German groups (often referred to as ‘hardcore anti-Germans’, although this term might be quite misleading) made it a point to celebrate every single move in American foreign politics in the past and present. Instead of just giving the US credit for the major role they’ve played in defeating Nazi-Germany in World War 2 and thereby putting an end to the holocaust, these groups are drawing close similarities between WW 2 and the “War on Terror”. By this they are putting the reactionary and anti-Semitic regimes in the so called Islamic world on one level with the Nazis. This is not only a serious minimization of the nazi era and the holocaust, but also a violation of the (radicalized) categorical imperative of Karl Liebknecht, that the main enemy is one’s “own country”. These anti-Germans see themselves on the side of civilization and declare Islam their main target instead of Germany.”

Like the “hardcore anti-Germans”, the “hardcore anti-American imperialist” tendency makes the error of discarding the essential multipolarity of imperialism. Further, Liebknecht wasn’t calling for the defeat of German Empire at the hands of Russian and American imperialisms, but by a revolutionary social movement led by its own working class.

Coupling Liebknecht’s axiom with the acceptance of the unipolarity of imperialism leads to lesser evilist thinking: “If, as an American, my enemy is my ruling class, then it’s good if the Russian ruling class hurts my ruling class. If Russians of the subaltern sort get fed up with their government’s participation in wars in the Ukraine and Syria and form an anti-war movement that leads to decline in Russian influence there, then Ukraine will join NATO and turn away from Russian/SCO protectionist capitalism and Syria will undergo regime change, and that’s what my enemies at home want so that’s bad.” The moment you accept this lesser evilism, you begin to look to the Russian ruling elites as your friends instead of the common people of Russia. Taken to its extreme, this “hardcore” tendency to make saviors out of perceived foreign enemies can lead to even more cringeworthy iterations than “pro-Russian anti-imperialism”. Some would-be leftists in the West apply the same faulty way of thinking to extend “critical support” to ISIS as an enemy of US imperialism [X]. Sometimes this phenomenon even works in reverse, such as when American white supremacists managed to receive official DPRK sponsorship for their self-declared support and solidarity for the besieged North Korean state [X].

The Liebknechtian “enemy at home” theme of anti-Americanism can soon be forgotten when one begins to accept the idea that American imperialism is the only imperialism in the world today. Focus is displaced in the same way that the “hardcore anti-Germans”, in their unthinking embrace of Americanism, forgot that Germany was supposed to be their main enemy. By assimilating the American ruling class point of view, they began to view America’s main enemy du jour, “radical Islam”, as their main enemy. The same process of displacement and forgetting occurs with the “pro-Russian anti-imperialism” variety of anti-Americanism. When one adopts this attitude, one begins to see the cohesion of the “most realistic” social force for the defeat of US imperialist machinations (i.e., Sino-Russian/SCO-led capitalism) as more essential than organizing or mobilizing in one’s own Western community, where the people are too brainwashed, unreliable, holding a deeply reactionary disposition. Whenever one adopts any sort of “pro-enemy” anti-imperialism, there is a real danger that the struggle against the enemy at home is displaced by prioritizing the struggle against “the enemy’s enemies” wherever they are, often leading to cheerleading because those enemies are physically nowhere near the “anti-imperialist” living in the heart of Empire. The pro-Russian Westerner begins to spend more time sharing Russia Today articles, complaining about Pussy Riot psyops, and speculating about the collapse of the dollar as the world reserve currency, than he does organizing and mobilizing to defeat empire at home. And even if he does take this step, it is to organize a pro-Russian micro-sect whose members’ activity are directed to amplifying the cheerleading he would otherwise do individually. He begins to fret as much about Ukrainian enemies as American ones, if not more.

Russian monopoly-finance capital

The majority of the “anti-imperialists” we have been discussing here bank their thesis of (Sino-)Russian non-imperialism on the presence of lower levels of finance capital found in countries like Russia (and China) relative to countries like the United States, France, Britain, and Japan. They argue that finance capital does not dominate the Russian economy in the same way that it does in these other countries, and therefore it is not imperialist.

But here they have abstracted one essential feature of imperialism outlined by Lenin (the importance of finance capital’s role) from the synergetic whole and discarded the equally essential notion that imperialistic monopolization can never totally eliminate competition. Although imperialism’s monopolization and elimination of free competition is not equivalent to the implementation of centralized economic planning, the latter was used to varying degrees to modernize Russian and Chinese imperialisms. Indeed, as we have seen, the supposition of a super-imperialist elimination of all imperialist competition requires adjustments to old school Marxian theory; it requires admittance of a new stage of development unforeseen by most of the classical Marxian scientific social theorists. In other words, supposition that Russia and China’s successful bourgeois-democratic and failed socialist revolutions during the 20th century have not pretty much brought them up to speed with the rest of the imperialist world only makes sense in the case that the rest of the imperial great powers have entered, and are already quite advanced in, a new revolutionary period; namely, the idea that neoliberal globalization is in fact a bourgeois-globalist revolution. On the other hand, the Sino-Russian rapprochement and its expansionist policy to incorporate the South Asian subcontinent into its own almost demi-global economic bloc shows that there are now two great camps vying for hegemony to carry out the bourgeois-globalist revolution according to their own interests. Within each camp there are antagonisms too innumerable to cover here.

The other problem with the “not enough finance capital in Russia and China for them to be true imperialists” argument is that this ignores the vast discrepancy between the levels of finance capital in Russia and China relative to the smaller sovereignties whose territories fall within the Russian and Chinese traditional imperial spheres of influence, which date from the pre-capitalist period.

Before looking at the inequalities between China and Russia and their supposedly “ex-”imperial spheres of influence, it is important to iterate the notion of continuity between semi-feudal, national capitalist, and globalist capitalist imperialisms, including the American and Western European empires. It is certainly no coincidence that pre-capitalist empires have a tendency to become monopoly-finance capital empires. Russia and China are no different in that Russian and Chinese “socialist” dominion over what were once semi-feudal empires evidences both a lack of true socialist commitment to unification of peoples on a voluntary basis as well as continuity between imperialisms. Bourgeois-democratic modernization under the veneer of “socialism” allowed 20th century Russian and Chinese nationalists, many/most of whom likely genuinely thought they were Communists, to save their backwards semi-feudal empires from being transformed into colonies of the more advanced empires by reversing the order of the Western recipe for modernization by implementing nationalization-cum-monopolization before and in parallel to industrialization. (In other words, free competition was ended in order to accelerate development to a level which would increase competitivity vis-a-vis other monopoly capitalisms).

One “anti-imperialist” analyst and apologist for Great-Russian chauvinism identifies a group of countries “very poor in finance capital” among which are categorized Russia and “most of the Eastern European countries”, as if the Russian Federation were on equal finance capital footing with the Republic of Moldova, when in that country 70% of the banking sector is controlled by Russian capitalists. It was in Moldova, said to be the poorest country in Europe, that a scandal dubbed “the theft of the century” unraveled last year in which a sum equivalent to one-eighth of the country’s GDP (about one billion USD) was apparently syphoned off to a pro-Russian politician. To give an idea of the scope of this neocolonialist robbery, this would have been proportionately equivalent to over 262 billion USD “disappearing” from Russian banks and funneled to a foreign country.

“One can only conclude that foreign investment, far from being an outlet for domestically generated surplus, is a most efficient device for transferring surplus generated abroad to the investing country.” – Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy in “Obstacles to Economic Development”

The intermediary strength of Russian capitalist imperialism is apparent here. Russian finance capital does not dominate globally to the extent of US capital, but it is clear that it plays a petit-imperialist role in regional markets. To deny this would be to paint the relationship between Russia and countries like Moldova as one in which each party comes to the table as an equal, overlooking the inequalities of this nested financial core and periphery relation existing semi-independently of the global core-periphery schema. Middle countries like Russia and China are not at the vanguard of neoliberal globalization, nor however are their throats under the jackboot of it. They do have some aspects that could be characterized as semi-neocolonial; for example, the exploitation of Chinese workers by American corporations like Apple, which takes more than 98% of the profit for each iPhone assembled in China [Foster], but they are nevertheless capitalist great powers whose ruling bourgeois cliques’ class character is more patriotic nationalist than comprador. The simultaneous appearance of semi-neocolonial aspects does not negate the monopoly type relationship between the banking sectors of countries like Russia and Moldova or perhaps China and North Korea or the imperialist logic behind SCO bids to unseat US hegemony or at the least prevent US encroachment into their spheres of influence. They are simply less developed, poorer great powers, but imperialist nonetheless.

We can already anticipate what the apologists for petit-imperialism will retort to such facts: this imperialism “doesn’t count” because Moldova is a former Soviet republic that had previously been annexed by the Russian Empire after a semi-feudal inter-imperialist (and therefore not really imperialist) war between the Ottoman and Russian Empires; there are a lot of Russian settler-colonizer descendants there; and US/NATO/EU imperialism is bigger and badder; andtherefore countries colonized by Russia should keep adhering to Russian capitalism. But this is exactly what makes “alternative-imperialism” an apt name for this position. The authors of “Condemned to Win!” are right to declare, “You cannot be an anti-imperialist and at the same time be a running dog for Russian or Chinese imperialism.”

The binary political thinking of vulgar “anti-imperialism”, an international analogue to domestic lesser evilism in the two-party system

The illusion-sowing and myopic opportunism of Westerners who deploy “‘pro-enemy’ anti-imperialist” analysis of foreign affairs is mirrored in their countries’ domestic politics. It must be understood how and why lesser evilism drives reactionary approaches both abroad and at home.

We can observe the fundamental similarity of these two lesser evilisms by continuing briefly the case study of Moldova introduced above, where, much like in eastern Ukraine, the “Party of Socialists” engages in pro-Russianism, based more on nostalgia for the Soviet era than on any genuine will to build socialism, by using as its slogan, “Together with Russia!”. Together with capitalist Russia, together with undocumented migrant-exploiting Russia. Thus in Eastern European countries Democrats and Republicans find their analogues in pro-Westerner and pro-Russian political camps. The difference between “Together with Russia!” and “Together with Europe!” is as palpable as “I’m with Her!” and “Make America Great Again!”.

“Party of Socialists – Together with Russia!” (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

Let us take as another example the case of NATO intervention in Libya in 2011. Certain sections within America’s organized Left moved beyond agitating to arouse opposition to US-led NATO intervention, into the pitiful realm of attempting to arouse admiration for the Libyan Jamahiriya, the “state of masses” and land of universal health-care, vast sums of free money, and direct democracy as a legitimate and “actually-existing” form of socialism. This push to switch and/or pair opposition to US imperialism with support for the Islamist “socialist” ideology concocted by Muammar Gaddafi in TheGreen Book [X] is mirrored in the attempts of the organized US Left to switch and/or pair opposition to that edifice of the US bourgeoisie’s class dictatorship known as the two-party system with support for the pseudo-anticapitalist Green Party of Jill Stein and Cynthia McKinney, in whose personnage we see perhaps most clearly the rapprochement between Green political movements of the Islamic “socialist” and environmentalist varieties. (Note that voting for an evil third party does not constitute a break with lesser evilism).

Opportunistic adhesion to “actually-existing socialism” abroad (which places the political center “out there” to the detriment of emerging political centers “over here”)—whether it’s in the form of shrieking defensively about the the “state of the of the masses” in Libya, the “socialist state control of industry” in secular Arab national “socialist” Ba’athist Syria (the same state that agreed to systematically torture people on behalf of the CIA “in a gesture of goodwill towards the United States”), or the world’s youngest “Red-Brown” coalition-based “people’s republics” in Donbass and Lugansk—follows the same logic which leads too many left-wing activists in the US to rally behind (without voicing much, if any, criticism) the “actually-existing movement for political revolution” in the US, even though this movement remains firmly opposed to social revolution with weak sauce ideologues like Bernie Sanders, Robert “Saving Capitalism” Reich, and Jill Stein at the helm.

When this part of the US left forces do finally arrive at the call for a bourgeois (Green) break with the two-party system, it’s only after they abandon Wall Street’s left wing and graveyard of social movements, the Democratic Party, with great reluctance. Even into July 2016, some “socialist” two-party system critics still had such hyped-up levels of delusion in the “progressiveness” of elements of the Democratic Party that they were still openly discussing the possibility that Bernie Sanders would break from the Democrats to run as a Green Party candidate, even though he announced many times his intention to support Hillary Clinton.

At home and abroad, work with bourgeois forces competing to implement their mildly differing imperialist visions of capitalist globalization, some a little more protectionist, some a little more neoliberal. These are the courses of action, the arguments go, that will “advance the working class movement”; because by tossing another big-contender reformist pro-capitalist party in the electoral mix, you pave the way for a revolutionary mass party of the working class, and by deluding yourself into believing that Bush-Cheney C.I.A. torture infrastructure was partially socialist, you pave the way for the final annihilation of monopoly capitalism. Although it is common for groups advocating these positions to pick one or the other—lesser evilism abroad (pro-Russian but anti-two party system) or lesser evilism at home (pro-Green/Bernie but anti-‘vulgar anti-imperialist’), they really evidence two sides of the same coin.

In truth, people who cannot argue for the defense of Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, and so many other countries from the US war machine, or breaking with the two-party system, without sowing illusions in and glamorizing the lacklustre leadership of these causes (Gaddafi, Putin, Stein, Sanders, et al.) show the hollowness and bankruptcy of their own thought.

The theories espoused by United Kingdom-based blogger and “pro-Russian anti-imperialist” Phil Greaves (picked here as an example of the wider trend and political current he represents) illustrates the mistake of reducing anti-imperialism (and therefore imperialism) to mere policy options that great powers can pick and choose in whether or not to implement. This is the same error which Lenin criticized Kautsky for making a century ago, when he lambasted Kautsky’s non-sensical talk of a unipolar imperialism that did not take into account “the competition between several imperialisms”:

“The essence of the matter is that Kautsky detaches the politics of imperialism from its economics, speaks of annexations as being a policy ‘preferred’ by finance capital, and opposes to it another bourgeois policy which, he alleges, is possible on this very same basis of finance capital.” [X]

According to Greaves, the bourgeois government of the Russian Federation implements certain key “objectively anti-imperialist” [X] policies (which good Western leftists ought to “support” by joining good pro-Russian [“Communist”] organizations in the West) by sending its military to intervene in Syria against ISIS and in Ukraine against the pro-Western government installed after the Maidan movement (both identified as fascist US puppets). This abstracts politics from economics by positing that Russia, an imperialist country (because, as we have seen, it uses monopoly finance capital to exploit countries in its sphere of influence in a neocolonial fashion), can in one place be “objectively imperialist” and in another be “objectively anti-imperialist”. One can only come to the conclusion that the Russian bourgeoisie has implemented a “bad” imperialist policy decision in Moldova, while at the same time implementing a “good” anti-imperialist policy decision in Ukraine and Syria, if one wears the ideological blinkers of an unscientific school of “thought” we might term neo-Stalinism.

In this essay I have focused on the critique of vulgar anti-imperialism, an area where I found myself to be in agreement with the Red Guards Austin. There are nevertheless some areas where I feel the Red Guards’ positions, which are not unique to their group, should be contested. I will present the bulk of these criticisms in Part II of my response to “Condemned to Win!”. In light of their self-declared willingness to accept criticism, I hope that Part II and the following section will be received by them in a comradely fashion.

It has to be admitted that use of the term of derision “bastard” is problematic and stands in dissonance with Red Guards Austin statement that they “hold that bad gender practice is not acceptable for Maoists and that rectifying this should be given the utmost priority, without delay, excuses, or liberalism.” The term “bastard”, having arisen in English common law as a synonym for “whoreson”: the child of an “illegitimate” sexual liaison, is steeped in misogynist and patriarchal thinking. The Oxford dictionary informs us that the etymology of the insult “bastard” is ultimately Latin, coming from the word bastum which means “packsaddle” and entered the English language via the related Old French expression fils de bast, “son of a mule driver who uses a packsaddle for a pillow and is gone by morning” (compare with modern French fils de pute). Formulations found in “Condemned to Win!” like “arch-revisionist bastard Deng Xiaoping” and “bastards like Krushchev, Brezhnev, and their crews” are no less problematic bad gender practice than if they were to refer to these people as “sons of bitches”.

Greetings illustrious cyber comrades,

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I know that a number of you are #FeelingTheBern right about now. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be enough penicillin to go around. Big Politica wants to keep you on the placebo, but maybe . . . if I engineer these memes juuust right . . . we can find a cure.

Even amongst those of you who only have first to second degree Berns, there is a certain reticence to let criticisms fall too harshly upon the charred ears of the third-degreeers, for fear of being read as “attacking”, “admonishing”, or pooh-poohing this oh so promising development. (Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example.) But truly I tell you, the time has come to stop the coddling and recognize the Bernie Sanders campaign for what it is: a fraud and a mockery of the word socialism.

The electoral successes of the Sanders campaign in many of the 2016 primaries and caucuses reflect an underlying trend towards a more radicalized “unconventional” way of thinking which, for the most part, is catching on independently of whether or not “The Left” as such is directly involved in it. However, would-be avant-garde leftists do no favors, neither to themselves nor to the masses, by sowing more illusions of hope and change in the Democratic Party, or by diluting our own revolutionary message.

In a political contest where the most prominent competitors from both the Democratic and Republican parties have clamored to proudly announce that they’ve received endorsements from public figures acknowledged by mainstream media to be implicated in a devastating genocide, it’s not hard for Sanders fans to play the “lesser evil” card. But what we are witnessing now is a nesting of lesser evilisms. While the old “lesser evilist” argument used to go that a person ought to hold her nose and vote for the Democrats so as to keep out the diabolical Republicans (or, in another variation on lesser evilism, vote for the capitalist Green Party as a part of a transitional program towards the breaking of the two-party system and the eventual building of a mass socialist party of the working class), a significant gradation has occurred over the course of the 2016 presidential primaries season; many a socialist now wonders whether she should join the Democratic Party and lend her support to Hillary Clinton’s acclaimed “democratic socialist” challenger. There are presumably two principal factors which contribute to the emergence of a Left preference towards Sanders: a perceived ideological proximity between him and the Left and the large size of the Democratic Party he is running in [cue feelings of shame and inadequacy over sectarian irrelevance].

The typical argument of the first to second degree Bern victims goes something like this (my emphasis):

I’m not suggesting people don’t vote for Bernie (or that they do). Personally, I like him as far as potential candidates in the two major parties go—which is to say I could stomach voting for him. No question, in the absence of an actual political revolution a Sanders’ presidency is welcome in my book. But I won’t delude myself into believing it would represent anything approaching a political revolution. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to admonish those who are “Feeling the Bern.” I mean to challenge them to ruminate on what a political revolution might really look like and the sacrifices it will require of us. And, if they still want one, to stop waiting for the presidential election and start fighting now.

[…] instead of attacking Sanders campaign as a fraud or not “real socialism,” we want to reach out to the grassroots supporters of the Sanders campaign and let them know that we, like them, want real change. We want to emphasize that socialism is much better than capitalism and use the space to have meaningful, friendly and persuasive discussions about what socialism is and how it can work.

This discourse reflects the marginal position of The American Left™ in the U.S. political scene, one that teeters precariously on the verge of absence. Anxious not to be seen as irrelevant pooh-poohers, they worry that to express too strongly disagreement with Bernie Sanders and his supporters, or too little enthusiasm for the emergence of “political revolution” as a demand in mainstream political discourse, would result only in them being pushed further into the extreme political peripheries. These directives to avoid the stigmata of being an “admonisher” or an “unfriendly” fellow amount to a conspiracy of silence.

First, Sanders’ campaign mantra — “Ready for Political Revolution” is worth examining more closely, as it is very telling as to the nature of what’s going on here. This carefully worded slogan is a dog whistle to the capitalist class. It says, “That socialism talk? Just a lil shameless posturing. I’m not really going to encourage anyone to make all your modes of production are belong to us!”

To understand why this is, just ask yourself: Why is the Bernie Sanders revolution qualified with the adjective “political”? Look up the definition of the term “political revolution” and you will begin to understand. The Marxist Internet Archive’s Encyclopedia of Marxismsays:

A political revolution is the forcible overthrow of the ruling political caste by a mass movement which does not aim to overthrow the underlying relations of production or smash the state. The term is used particularly in relation to the Soviet Union, and was the policy of the Trotskyist movement from 1933. The political revolution was to throw out the Stalinistbureaucracy and restore proletarian democracy.

Political revolution is often contrasted with social revolution. For example, the same encyclopedia mentions the following in this entry on Thermidor:

The French Revolution was one of history’s greatest social revolutions, along with the English Revolution of 1640-49, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 – social in that the mass of the population participated in the revolution, changing the whole social system, rather than a political revolution which merely changed the governing edifice.

So from these facts we can gather the following similarities and differences between political and social revolution, illustrated in the form of a nifty Venn diagram:

With reference to the Soviet Union, the call for “political revolution” was issued with the understanding that the socialist revolution of 1917 in Russia brought with it significant social progress, gains which were worth defending in the face of counterrevolution (such as democratic, public control of industry, increased human rights for women, ethnic and sexual minorities, and the destruction of an oppressive state), even in the face of a Stalinist bureaucratic caste-gradually-turned-state-capitalist-class which by the 1920s had begun to move towards authoritarianism and restoration of capitalism. The idea of “political revolution” was that this restoration, which wasn’t completely and symbolically finalized until 1991, could have been prevented without necessarily smashing the proletarian state born of the October Revolution. It was the idea that the Soviet experiment had been promising, great even, in its early years, and was still promising, because so long as the state retained some proletarian aspect in principal, in the face of de facto bureaucratic mismanagement, this de jure element could be reinvigorated.

When Bernie Sanders says he’s down with political revolution, he’s implicitly stating that he’s not down with social revolution. The former seeks to preserve the economic structures and the apparatuses of class rule already in place by installing a new political regime which can better manage what is not a fundamentally flawed system, while the latter aims to overthrow these and replace them with something else. In this sense these revolution types (political and social) are opposites; one is to save the system, the other is to destroy it. You demand a political revolution when the economic set up is okay, but mismanaged or poorly managed. You call for a social revolution when the system is rotten at its core. Many second to third degree Bern victims are quite explicit about the fact that they endorse the Sanders “political revolution” precisely because they see this historic juncture as one of the last moments at which capitalism might be saved “for the many, [and] not the few”. At least some Bernie backers are honest though; historian Bernard Weisberger urges the so-called “democratic socialist” to drop the “socialist” label and call himself something slightly more accurate: a social democrat. Sanders himself meanwhile offers entirely nonsensical visions of socialism:

I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal. I believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America instead of shipping jobs and profits overseas.

In Sanders’ statement above, it is made clear that the “political revolution” he envisions is not meant to challenge the class structure inherent in U.S. capitalism, but merely make it more efficient. “The middle class and the working families [read: lower class]”, by virtue of being signifiers for entities which exist relative to one another in a class hierarchy which continues to exist in Sanders’ vision of socialism, will continue to be subordinated to the ruling upper class. Sanders also makes it explicitly apparent that he favors private ownership of the means of production, which is the very definition of capitalism. In topsy-turvy Sandersland, socialism is capitalism and capitalism is socialism: “providing welfare for corporations, huge tax breaks for the very rich, or trade policies which boost corporate profits as workers lose their jobs” is “socialism for the rich”. Nevermind the fact that Sanders, in decrying the outsourcing which transfers wealth and jobs abroad and pandering to “Buy American”-style economic nationalism in the same breath, is himself advocating socialism for the rich. Indeed, in an interview in the summer of 2015 with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Sanders argued forcefully in favor of violating a vast array of human rights of the global poor (e.g., rights to freedom of movement and freedom from discrimination, to free choice of employment, to equal pay for equal work), positing that Fortress America’s borders must continue to be in large part closed to them (the world’s poor) in order to maintain its higher standard of living, because an influx of Global South migrants would, according to Sanders, “make everybody in America poorer.”

Sanders’ painting of his own campaign as some kind of an antithesis or even a panacea to the forces of anti-immigrant bigotry being mobilized by Donald Trump falls even flatter on its face when, in addition to Bernie’s rejection of open borders as a matter of nationalist principle (“you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that” — in other words, Bernie doesn’t think any country in the world is guided by Marxian concepts, so America shouldn’t be either [so much for American exceptionalism]), one considers the fact that, even if Sanders were to be elected and honor the promise he made on Univision “not to deport immigrants who don’t have a criminal record”, this would only cover a minority of so-called “undocumented immigrants”: those who were financially well off and qualified enough to be granted a visa before coming to the USA. The majority of the undocumented population, wherein its most vulnerable segment can be found, are those who, having no hope to be granted a visa because they are among those “kinds of people” who people like Bernie Sanders believes will “work for $2 or $3 an hour” and “make everybody in America poorer”, choose to commit the criminal offense of “improper entry” into the United States. Sanders offers no real solutions, as his call for the conservation of controlled borders, which are really closed borders to some and open borders to others, has zero foresight: there would still be huge numbers of “improper entrants” under any scheme to keep the global poor out of America in order to maintain a higher concentration of wealth there, and given Sanders’ statement on an open borders policy amounting to “doing away with the nation state”, the odds of Sanders decriminalizing improper entry are quite slim.

When the concept of “political revolution” is applied and called for in the context of the early 21st century United States of America, it translates, in a very real sense, to “Make America Great Again.” Wanting to look to its own experience, this American Dream Socialism™ continually grasps for straws as it seeks desperately to render these two warring ideals, Americanism and socialism, compatible. Take for example one commentator (the above cited historian, Weisberger) who, seeking to make this “basic American idea” of socialism more palatable, identifies its origin in the “brotherly love” espoused by Reverend John Winthrop in 1630, a theocrat who just so happened to dabble in the slave trade and genocide. Sanders’ own attempts to Americanize socialism are equally cringeworthy. In a debate last November, vowing to keep rates of taxation on the ultra-wealthy lower than they were under Dwight D. Eisenhower, Sanders said, “I’m not that much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower.” Needless to say, Eisenhower, president during the McCarthyite era, oversaw the most intense phase of the (Second) Red Scare, when socialists were subject to witch hunts, blacklisting, and even executions. To call such an administration “socialist” for any reason is truly a farce.

American Dream Socialism™ can’t seem to help but seek inspiration and legitimacy in these awful examples of genocidal, slave-owning, McCarthyite “socialism” because American Dream Socialism™ is essentially steeped in coloniality (the unified structure of control developed during the colonial period which persists in the aftermath of the dismantlement of most formal colonial administrations [See here and here]). Its Americanism is predicated not only upon the erasure and eradication of indigeneity, transforming vast swathes of Turtle Island into a postapocalyptic palimpsest, but also on the alienation and disconnection (of those whom it absorbs) from their own self histories, when it can bleach them in a flood of whiteness, burn them in the melting pot. This whiteness as disconnection was the basis of the doctrine of “American exceptionalism” (read: supremacism), which 19th century newspaperman John L. O’Sullivan described in 1839, anticipating the invention of the term “American Dream” by almost a century, when he wrote in “The Great Nation of Futurity” that the USA’s “disconnected position as regards any other nation” as well as regards “the past history of any [other nation], and still less with all antiquity” derived from the “American people having derived their origin from many other nations”. For O’Sullivan, the strength of this disconnect between Americans and the past was the linchpin which made America unique from all the other nations of the world; it was key to explaining why America stood out as the nation “of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement”. But what kind of progress did O’Sullivan envision? Manifest destiny (a term coined by O’Sullivan in 1845): the “progressive” expansion of imperial hegemony, the “progressive” expansion of chattel slavery. American Dream Socialism™ is Steinbeckian at its core in that it is riddled with contradictions, paradoxes: our “socialist” forefathers preach “brotherly love” and “universal enfranchisement” before proceeding to massacre, enslave and systematically deny human rights to the Other.

The coloniality of power which machinates behind paradoxical American Dream Socialism™ is on display in full force whenever Bernie “Military Option is Always a Possibility” Sanders is cajoled into speaking about America’s latest sub-human boogie man: “ISIL”. Despite his lamentations that he “[does] get very upset at people who are so prepared to send other people’s kids into […] war,” Sanders has consistently done exactly that which he bemoans by discursively dividing humanity according to national and religious differences, staking out all young people with U.S. citizenship as “his” / “ours” and delineating people from “Muslim countries [with] billionaire families” as “theirs”, and calling on “them” to “be aggressive”, “get their troops on the ground”, and “get their hands dirty”. Meanwhile, Sanders has no qualms about contributing to the slaughter and mayhem so long as American soldiers can do it from the comfort of air-conditioned rooms in North America, proclaiming in 2015, “we’ve got to continue air strikes.” And who could forget his love affair with drones?

In a word, no. Not when their idea of socialism is wrong. Not when they’re sowing illusions and misinformation which might leave people deluded and alienated from truth for generations to come. If it wasn’t for so many influential people — public figures and leaders of social movements — who, over the course of the last 150 years, propagated so many wrong ideas about what socialism is and how to achieve it, there’s a decent chance that we would already be living in a genuinely socialist world system. So let’s not be afraid to “admonish” those who continue to get it wrong. Let’s nip these falsehoods in the bud once and for all. Moreover, let’s not break Godwin’s Law: probably the most infamous polity in world history, Nazi Germany, called itself socialist. Yet, it would be absurd to argue that Hitler did the Left a big favor by achieving popularity with the label “national socialist”. The Nazi misappropriation of the “socialist” label played to Great Depression sentiments of disenfranchisement in a way that is not so different from how we now see opportunistic populists attempt to contain renewed interest in anti-capitalism from both the left-wing and right-wing angles during this “Great Recession”.

Now you’re thinking, Okay, okay, so Bernie Sanders really is a phoney bologna and large parts of The Left™ are opportunistically riding a wave into the fold of the Democratic Party or at best committing themselves to a friendly, non-admonishing silence and watching from the sidelines as this happens, but what’s the alternative? What am I supposed to do… turn into a Jason Dumbruhe, disengage from the world around me, and construct in my mental geography an idealized bastion of revolutionary potential in the lands somewhere to the south or east?

No, absolutely not!

Let’s take a tip from the pages of Eugene V. Debs, that radical figure who Bernie Sanders has attempted to recuperate for his watered down, capitalist, immigrant scapegoating, warmongering American Dream Socialism™. Debs said in the year 1900, “It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed.” Now, all the viable candidates for the next President of the United States are obviously scumbags. The best thing you can do, when it comes to actually voting, is cast a protest vote for a candidate who has literally no possibility of winning, maybe because they are under 35 years old, or born in Nicaragua, or only on the ballot of a number of states whose electoral votes add up to less than 270. Whatever the case may be, American presidential elections are really nothing more than a pretext for whatever ultra left-wing sects in existence near you to use the masses’ quadrennially mildly piqued interest in political matters as an occasion to preach at us. Do your part by listening to them and in turn forcing your opinions on other people in your school, workplace, or community, and also of course don’t forget to participate in direct actions for radical social justice causes like you should do independently of the election season. Furthermore, as you prepare to “throw away your vote”, keep in mind that it is better to cast that protest vote for a Marxist candidate than for politically confused ones such as Vermin Supreme (who’s probably about as much of an “anarchist” as Bernie Sanders is a “socialist”) because the ruling class is probably more freaked out by principled anti-capitalist opposition than by harmless jokes.

Henry took the hint and the two men ate their sandwiches without speaking to each other for the rest of the break.

In the past few months, Jack had taken the initiative to make a more concerted effort to actively brush up on his Spanish. He’d reached a very rudimentary level in the couple of years he’d studied the language in high school, but he wasn’t anywhere near the level of proficiency required to effectively eavesdrop on his cheetah-tongued Mexican co-workers. But working at Quality Ham Handlers, Inc. (QHH) afforded him plenty of opportunities to acclimate his ears to the migrant workers’ sociolect. Jack and Henry were among the handful of “Americans” who still worked at the plant. With the exception of Jack, a fair degree of xenophobia coursed through the veins of the majority of them.

It’d been that way since the middle of the 1980s, when the company was founded. You see, Quality Ham Handlers existed as an independent firm largely only on paper. In reality, the company was inextricably linked to the Moorehall Foods Corporation, makers of SHAM–“the minty meat”–a kitsch luncheon meat, originally marketed as “meat by-product”, whose name was a portmanteau of the words “shiso” and “ham”. (Shiso is a culinary herb of the mint family originating in Asia). Moorehall workers had gone on strike in 1985 to protest cuts to pay and benefits at a time when the company was making record profits. Reaganomics was to blame. But a year later, in 1986, when all was said and done, the workers’ strike had been crushed. The National Guard was sent to the small Southern Minnesota town to protect scabs and strikebreakers until, finally, the union gave up. But Moorehall continued to wage war on the working class, setting up Quality Ham Handlers as a proxy company where workers would lack the protection of a union. QHH would handle the unglamorous task of slaughtering tens of thousands of hogs daily, the first step in processing, while the adjacent Moorehall Foods plant would take charge of the second half of processing, as well as packaging and distribution, and continue to be known as the makers of SHAM. Not long after crushing the pesky labor union, Moorehall began actively recruiting workers from Mexico, virtually all of them so-called “illegal aliens”–their documents either forged or purchased from lumpen Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. But all of that was seldom discussed in Augustin, Minnesota–a modern day company town branded “SHAM Town, USA” by its chamber of commerce.

“Alright, back to work, ya goddamn miscreants!” the foreman shouted, putting an abrupt end to the meatpackers’ brief respite.

Jack put his tin lunchbox back in his cubbyhole, while Henry threw his plastic wrapper-filled paper bag and empty aluminum can into the non-recyclable waste bin uncaringly.

The work they went back to was gruelling. The handling of the ham was industrial, comparable to a death camp in an almost non-hyperbolical sense. First the pigs had to be slaughtered. That was Jack’s job. Then they had to be drained, sliced, diced. Many workers suffered from repetitive stress and strain injuries of the hands and arms: carpal tunnel, cubital tunnel, radial tunnel, you-name-it syndrome.

To kill the pigs, Jack used a highly pressurized stick-shaped device that blasted out their brains, creating a fine aerosolized cerebral mist which splashed across Jack each time he blasted out a hog’s brain. He breathed in the fine mist and, in a quasi-robotic fashion, repeated this life termination process hundreds of times.

Hours later, a bell tolled, signalling the end of his shift.

Jack changed out of his work clothes, pinkened by the aerosolized brain mist, and headed home. He lived alone in the northeast part of town, in a small wood-paneled house covered in mold and peeling paint.

* * *

Almost immediately upon arrival, Jack packed a glass pipe with cannabis–what the locals typically referred to as “a bowl of weed”–turned on his TV, sat back, and began toking. After a long day of slaughtering hogs, smoking dope in the evening was Jack’s preferred method of unwinding. Jack wasn’t the only person for whom this had become a daily ritual. Thousands of workers in SHAM Town, USA self-medicated this way, unable to afford the high cost of traditional health care.

On TV, the local news team was covering what were two of the biggest national stories at the time: marijuana legalization and a recent wave of protest in response to a spate of killings of unarmed Blacks by white cops.

“Today, lawmakers in Nevada voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Nevada joins Colorado, Washington, Alaska, and Oregon, becoming the fifth state in the Union to completely legalize recreational marijuana, in addition to the nation’s capital, Washington DC,” the anchorwoman spoke.

“Woo hoo!” Jack exclaimed gruffly as a thick fume of weed vapor emerged from his face.

“That’s right, Melanie. But local law enforcement officers say the move is the wrong one,” her co-anchor chimed in.

“Boo!” Jack jeered.

The screen cut to a clip of a local police spokesman rattling on. “Federal law and Minnesota state law continue to uphold marijuana prohibition. Suspected users and distributors of any controlled substance will still get the same harsh treatment we’ve always dished out to pot-smokers here in Bower County. And the biggest fear on our end is that, with the push for legalization out West, these substances will become more readily available on the black market here in SHAM Town, USA.”

Anchorwoman Melanie Peterson continued, “Meanwhile, proponents of the legislation say that the law doesn’t go far enough. Employers in all five states and the District of Columbia are still permitted to administer urine drug screening tests and fire employees found to be using the now legalized drug, a situation which critics say constitutes discrimination against a category of law-abiding citizens.”

The program cut to another camera angle, focusing on Melanie’s co-anchor, Robert Larson, signalling a transition to another news item.

“In other news, protests continue to spread across the Midwest as anger grows over the shooting death of alleged strong-arm robber Giovanni Beasley just five days ago. Beasley is said to have committed a brutal strong-arm robbery at an Omaha, Nebraska billiard hall before being fatally shot down by a police officer named Derek Harding. While at first the protests were said to have been peaceful, reporters with our sister station on the ground have seen lawlessness and disorder quickly prevail. Within twenty-four hours of Beasley’s death, violent copycat riots spread to the neighboring city of Lincoln, Nebraska, before continuing to spread during the ensuing hours like one of the wild prairie fires which plagued the Great Plains of yesteryear to Des Moines, Kansas City, Saint Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis.”

Jack tapped the ashes out of his pipe and reached for his baggy, ready to load up another bowl of stress and anxiety-relieving dope.

“That’s right, Robert,” Melanie Peterson read from the teleprompter. “Now governors in Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri have declared states of emergency and are using their state National Guards to quell the uprisings. Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota have managed to contain the predominantly African-American perpetrated violence thanks to the upstanding work of municipal police forces, for now at least.”

“Oh my,” Robert Larson responded. “Let’s just hope things don’t get that crazy up here in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes!”

“Warning. You are experiencing a broadcast signal intrusion,” a woman’s voice interrupted. She spoke in a British accent and Jack’s television set flashed with static and a color bar test pattern. The video feed was then spliced with a pseudo-thermogram. The screen displayed a person wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. She and her environment were colored in neon blues, greens, yellows, oranges, pinks, and reds, as though the viewer were a snake or a heat-seeking surveillance drone, able to optically perceive infrared radiation. Perhaps this choice of visual effect was meant to activate some subconscious aspect of the hivemind by evoking the long forgotten ability of a remote ancestral uncle to sense beyond the sanguine hue through his facial pit organs, or perhaps it was merely an arbitrarily selected aesthetic motif derived from the same nostalgic fascination for the early post-Cold War era that spawned movements as far flung and diverse as sea-, cyber-, and synth-punk. Whatever it was, it caught people’s attention.

“Whoa,” Jack said, dropping his pipe and spilling the bud from his baggy all over his lap.

The mysterious person spoke in an American dialect now, “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Not. Not who? Not Anonymous!” She took off her Guy Fawkes mask and tossed it aside, revealing that her face was painted like a sugar skull. “Fuck anonymity, yo! It’s time to proclaim our new identity! We are not Anonymous . . . we are the Underground Resistance, and we’re here to say that Black Lives Matter! We say it’s time to dismantle the white bourgeois heterosexual supremacist social order and establish a new one, one that is built on human rights for all! We believe that the only way to get those rights to everybody is for us, the disempowered, to seize power, and wield it against our oppressors! The only way to end discrimination is to indiscriminately eliminate prejudiced folks from positions of power. We must stand together and physically, culturally, economically, and socially overpower the beneficiaries of the system! Giovanni Beasley’s demise is no isolated incident; it’s the inevitable result of this system’s intended functionality. The annihilation of this system begins now!”

Just then, the network regained control of the feed and put an abrupt stop to the hijacking of the broadcast.

“Err . . . sorry about that,” the distressed anchorman said.

“Crazy shit,” Jack mused as he began to collect the scattered bits of cannabis from his lap.

* * *

“McGillicuddy, Jack!” the foreman shouted.

Jack set down the brain-splayer, muttering to the hog before him, “Looks like you got a new lease on life, buddy.”

“McGillicuddy, the head supervisor wants to see you! Get in his office, now!”

The beast’s eyes darted back and forth in terror. Hanging upside down, he was unable to move his limbs, but he was still conscious, perfectly aware of what was about to be done to him due to the fact that Quality Ham Handlers decided to cut costs by drastically reducing the dosage of anesthesia administered to the hogs before they were slaughtered, much to the chagrin of the undercover animal rights activists who had managed to get jobs at the plant in order to document alleged violations of the rights they claimed these living creatures were entitled to. In vain the beast’s brain attempted to activate its righting reflex, but the drugs were strong enough to deactivate that.

Jack made his way to the office of QHH’s head honcho, distinguishable from the others by the gold leaf lettering ornamenting the sign upon its door which read Lawrence C. Kroemblin. He knew this couldn’t be good.

“What?” Jack said in disbelief. Normally management gave enough of a warning that workers had time to go to the local head shop, where synthetic urine was readily available for purchase, allowing workers and parolees to easily circumvent the costly and inefficient drug tests.

“What?” Mr. Kroemblin mimicked in a harassing tone. “Now get in there and piss,” he said, pointing to his office’s en-suite bathroom.

Jack’s blood began to boil with indignity. His red hot face twitched as he remembered the news of legal recreational pot use’s spread to Nevada, and the defiant message of the broadcast signal intrusion of the Underground Resistance.

“Now you listen here, Mr. Kroemblin . . .” Jack said with clenched fists, “You can shove your damn paper cup up your ass and I’ll keep my piss inside my bladder, cuz whether or not I use an herb whose recreational, medicinal, and spiritual properties have been known to Man for five thousand years or more ain’t none of your damn business! A storm is rolling across this great nation and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. It’s called legalization, and soon it’s gonna be prohibited to prohibit pot!”

Kroemblin was shocked. It’d been years since anyone’d had the guts to talk to the big boss like that.

Jack threw the cup to the ground and stormed out of Kroemblin’s office. He climbed to the top of a steel staircase and thundered to his fellow meatpackers, “Are you guys sick of this random drug testing or what? Prohibition isn’t working! Pot is already legal in five states! Even the politicians who are s’posed to be representin’ us in Washington DC can smoke pot! Who’s drug testin’ them? Enough of this bullshit! I’m fed up with it! I say we go on strike! We shut down the plant until Quality Ham Handlers and Moorehall Foods wake up and smell the coffee! Us meatpackers are pissed off as hell and we need to demand an end to mandatory drug testing! Legalization now!”

Large swathes of meatpackers on the slaughterhouse floor began applauding and cheering.

Many of the Latino workers had only understood the part about legalization, and thought that he meant legalization for undocumented immigrants. But others understood enough English to comprehend the gist of Jack’s message. Some of them were fumadores de mota as well. There had already been hushed threats of strike action rumbling amongst the Latino workers, who lived in constant fear of workplace raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

The Sudanese and Liberian workers, too, had their gripes with management. Mr. Kroemblin, in particular, was known to make microaggressive remarks to them. Kroemblin’s overseer underlings had even on occasion been overheard referring to the African migrants as “Hottentots”. In addition, QHH security collaborated openly with local law enforcement, who seemed to be on a crusade to disproportionately arrest, fine, and otherwise harass people of color in the community surrounding the SHAM factory.

Had Jack’s brazen and impassioned plea for dignity not been the catalyst to unleash this volcano of discontent, there surely was a good chance that something else would have, sooner or later. Jack was no savior, just an angry man at the right time and the right place.

“You’re frickin’ crazy, dude! But I love it!” Henry Schlapansky cried out, raising his fist in a gesture of which he was unaware was once known as a Black Power salute. Henry was a pothead too, as were virtually all of the other meatpackers passing themselves off as members of a social construct known as the white race.

* * *

The meatpackers’ wildcat strike unfolded rapidly.

It began with a walk-out. Not a single worker remained on the job. They spontaneously gathered outside, in the Quality Ham Handlers, Inc. parking lot. The atmosphere was that of jubilee. Workers could hardly believe the action they had just taken part in. It was unheard of. They mingled with one another, the old boundaries of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality almost forgotten in the unity of their direct action.

A Oaxacan worker whom Jack had never spoken to before came up to him and slapped him on the back in a friendly fashion. “Debemos fumar un rato juntos, vato loco,” he exclaimed. “Mi nombre es Emiliano. Nice to me you.”

Henry Schlapansky even managed to build an increased sense of solidarity with a group of Dinka workers by telling them a racist joke. It seemed to work because it was self-deprecating.

Meanwhile, a Colombian immigrant worker named Ricardo stood on the edge of the crowd and watched Jack calculatingly. Unlike most workers at the plant, Ricardo did not come to Augustin, Minnesota to try to make a better life for himself or his family. He came to agitate for communist revolution. Ricardo was a member of the Socialist Militants Party (SMP), and he had been directed to infiltrate the meatpacking industry as part of the Trotskyite sect’s political strategy. They called it “the turn to industry”, and they’d been at it since the late 1970s, shipping petit bourgeois left-wing ideologues off from the big burgs of the East and West Coasts to the mines of West Virginia and the slaughterhouses of the Midwest. The goal was communist intrusion into the blue collar world. Of course, this strange Marxian colonialism ought not have been necessary; yearning for communism and proletarian masses going hand-in-hand like peanut butter and jelly or beef jerky and beer, but during the heyday of the social movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, the SMP experienced an explosion of new members, many of them possessing a middle class psychology alien to that of the workers they sought to make their pawns. Unsure how to integrate these new members, and disoriented given the politically stagnant period following the simmering of the anti-war, civil rights, and gay, Black, and women’s liberation movements, “the turn to industry” seemed to be the answer. Before being recruited by the SMP, Ricardo had came to the United States of America as a graduate student in economics at New York University. The quintessential outside agitator.

QHH security didn’t take long to push the workers off the plant premises.

They left the QHH parking lot and headed across the street, where there was a large pond and a park, regrouping before the decision was made to march down Main Street and rally at City Hall.

* * *

“Goddamn. What the hell are those Mexicans up to now?” a local reactionary questioned as he watched the large crowd of predominantly Latino meatpackers march past a local dive bar whose culturally insensitive name was The Hiawatha Hole.

Many of the drunken old white men at The Hiawatha Hole were former Moorehall workers themselves, among those who had lost their jobs after the strike of ‘85-’86. After Reagan and the meatpacking monopolists crushed the workers’ strike with military force, reactionary views insidiously took root in an unfortunate number of the ex-strikers’ minds, many of them swallowing hook, line, and sinker the age old ruling class bait of dividing and pitting working class folks against one another as the trope of the job-stealing migrant became an almost ubiquitous received idea.

“Argh! Fuck this shit,” another drunk shouted, smashing his bar stool against the wall so as to break it apart and transform one of its legs into a club. “Let’s show those goddamn wetback invaders how we do it in America! Enough soft talk, it’s time to carry a big ass stick! Who’s with me?!”

The large group of drunks began cheering loudly and preparing for a beat down as they smashed the bar’s furniture to use fragments of it as clubs and bats before flowing out of the bar and onto the street.

“Go back to Mexico!” a drunken asshole screamed as he ran up to a meatpacker to club him with the wooden leg of a broken bar stool.

“Pinche racista!” a Latino worker bellowed as he came to his co-worker’s defense.

Both the immigrant workers and the local reactionaries began live-tweeting about the fight from their smartphones, summoning more supporters from each side to come to Main Street and participate in the violent spectacle as it rapidly devolved into a massive street brawl.

Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the lawlessness, police were unable to do much more than launch copious amounts of tear gas into the crowds, which only provoked the street brawlers to fan out and begin running amok beyond downtown, spreading and aggravating the mayhem.

* * *

Jack McGillicuddy and Henry Schlapansky managed to make it safely into a local church dining hall with a number of other meatpackers seeking shelter from the rampaging mobs of racists who were being joined now by an array of relatively well-organized right-wing extremist groups, including some of neo-Confederate as well as neo-Nazi persuasion.

The meatpackers sat around, trying to catch their breath. Some were badly injured, having only just barely escaped the racist mobs alive.

“Whoa there, bud! Don’t be talkin’ to my friend like that!” Henry spoke out in Jack’s defense, rushing up to them.

“What are you talking about, bro?” Jack shot back.

“Working class consciousness isn’t advanced enough for this level of struggle!” Ricardo shouted. “The Socialist Militants Party has been working diligently for years to build up a mass party of the working class, advance the class struggle. But with you coming in here and cavorting around with your adventurist antics, you could set our work back decades! These workers are badly hurt because of you!” he continued, pointing to the gravely wounded meatpackers who lay about, bleeding and moaning in agony.

“Whatever, bud! What are we supposed to do, sit around while Kroemblin gives us shit for smoking pot?! The time for legalization is now!” Jack shouted.

“You idiot, don’t you see marijuana legalization is just a scheme to pacify the workers?” Ricardo shot back. “If you were a dedicated activist like me, you would know that mixing marijuana and the socialist movement is just asking for the FBI to come in with COINTELPRO tactics and discredit us with frame-up charges! We in the Socialist Militants Party know all about that! Besides, a lot of us immigrants are fleeing the violence of the cartels that provide you with that mind-numbing dope in the first place!”

“Bullshit!” Henry interrupted. “Plenty of you Mexicans love smokin’ the good stuff too!”

Jack raised his fist in a threatening manner, about to sock Ricardo a good one, when the reverend of the church approached, pleading for the men to put a stop to their altercation. “God loves all His children,” the pastor began. “Love the foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt,” he spoke, quoting scripture at them.

“The number one priority is legalizing our people, I tell ya!” Ricardo argued forcefully. “This push for recreational pot legalization is classic COINTELPRO! If you can’t see that it’s a plot to deactivate the socialist struggle, then you’re a damned fool!”

“My foot!” said Jack. “We gotta legalize ‘em both!”

* * *

After news of the brutal race riot in SHAM Town, USA spread throughout the region, north to Minneapolis, south to Saint Louis, west to Omaha and Oglala, and east to Chicago and Detroit, all still embroiled in the uneasy unrest following the police murder of Giovanni Beasley, grassroots activists resolved to organize a modern day Freedom Ride to put a stop to the right-wing extremist repression and show solidarity with the striking meatpackers.

In the days following the meatpackers’ walk-out and the ensuing race riot, local anti-immigrant sentiments found their outlet in the formation of a new quasi-paramilitarist organization dubbed “Augustinites United Against Illegal Aliens”, or Augunagilliens for short. The Augunagilliens patrolled the streets assaulting anyone who dared to speak out in favor of the meatpackers and demanding photo ID from any brown person they encountered, placing those who were unable to prove legal resident status under citizen’s arrest.

At Quality Ham Handlers, the work stoppage went on.

Jack, Henry, Ricardo, and some of the other meatpackers continued to meet daily, in secret, at the church dining hall where they had sought refuge during the first day of mob violence.

“This is bullshit!” Jack shouted. “I could barely get here without those Augunagillien thugs giving me shit. The papers ran a story about me bein’ the initiator of the walk-out and now the whole town knows. We need to do something about these Brownshirt fucks!”

“Agreed,” Henry shot back. “Don’t get me wrong; immigrants oughtta come in this country legally, but man, the past few days have made me see things in a whole new light.”

“Get a load of this,” Jack interrupted, having been looking at the Twitter app on his smartphone when Ricardo was speaking. “Anti-racist activists are pouring into Augustin by the busload as we speak! They say they’re here to counter the Augunagilliens!”

“No way,” Henry replied excitedly.

“This is a dangerous development,” said Ricardo. “This strike movement is precarious enough as it is. We need the genuine Marxist leadership of the Socialist Militants Party to guide us, not the happy-go-lucky liberalism of these inexperienced anti-racist lives matter kiddos! Besides, these outside agitators could turn the townspeople against us!”

“Oh give it a rest, Ricardo. We’ve had enough of your bullshit. You call yourself a militant but all you do is naysay militancy!” Jack replied. “We need all the allies we can get.”

Just then, the meatpackers could hear what sounded like another massive street brawl occurring outside. Curious, they approached the windows to have a look and saw that the members of an Augunagillien patrol squad were being savagely assaulted by Anti-Racist Action and Black Lives Matter activists.

“C’mon, guys, what are y’all waiting for?!” Jack shouted. “Let’s get out there and help them!”

Henry emerged from the acolytes’ closet carrying a fascis of candlelighters as well as a processional cross. “We can use these to beat down our enemies with!” he shouted before tossing the sturdy metal and wooden staffs one at a time to eager meatpackers.

Other meatpackers raided the kitchen adjacent to the church dining hall, arming themselves with knives and cleavers as they prepared to engage the anti-immigrant bigots in close-quarters combat. Their work in the slaughterhouse had already desensitized them to the sight of blood. Furthermore, the industrial relentlessness of killing for mass consumption had forced them to acquire the techniques of the body necessary to mechanically stab, slash, and dismember mammalian bodies, to terminate life without so much as a second thought. Unlike the soldiers occupying Afghanistan for Uncle Sam, who might sit around at a base waiting weeks or even months before getting to experience the excitement of a firefight, a meatpacker was exposed to death, wrought death, in perpetuity. Capitalism had, it seemed, inadvertently set up the conditions for its own violent demise by inculcating the capacity to mechanistically perpetrate mass slaughter in a whole class of individuals whom it had intended only to exploit.

“For the wages of sin is death . . .” the reverend mused quietly as the armed immigrant workers flowed out of his church, knowing that not even the Word of God can negate the Laws of Physics.

The street battle which followed was harrowing, many lives being lost. But when all was said and done, the Augustinites United Against Illegal Aliens were annihilated. The sheer number of Anti-Racist Action and Black Lives Matter activists who’d flowed into the small meatpacking town overwhelmed the bigots and their friends in the police department. And with mass unrest in response to the modern day lynching of Giovanni Beasley continuing to grip all major urban centers throughout the Midwest, the National Guard was spread thin, unable to come and suppress the surge of radicalism in a city which, at a mere 30,000 inhabitants, was deemed to be of relatively low urgency by those responsible for triaging the rustbelt insurrection.

After driving the surviving immigrant-haters into hiding and securing the streets, the meatpackers marched to the Quality Ham Handlers and Moorehall Foods Corporation slaughterhouse complex.

“Down with Quality Ham Handlers!” the workers began to chant as they drew near.

With the huge crowd of ruffians pounding at the QHH gates, head supervisor Mr. Kroemblin grew nervous. Preparing for the worst, he dug deep into his desk and found his trusty pistol. He loaded a single bullet into it.

The plant’s privately contracted security force was no match for the large crowd of radicalized meatpackers and outside agitators for extreme social justice. Like a locomotive, the large mass of working class individuals plowed through the gates and began to run amok through the factory.

Henry Schlapansky and Jack McGillicuddy joined a fraction of the mob who split off in the direction of Mr. Kroemblin’s office.

“Come out, come out, Señor Kroemblin,” a disgruntled meatpacker hissed through the cracks of the supervisor’s locked door, gripping in his right hand a meat cleaver that dripped with fresh blood.

The disgruntled workers began hacking away at the wooden door with their cleavers.

Kroemblin brought the loaded pistol to his temple, ready to be done with life, but he just wasn’t able to bring himself to pull the trigger.

Smash! The door was destroyed, and a dozen or so crazed meatpackers stormed into his office.

“He’s got a gun!” Schlapansky shouted.

Kroemblin still held the gun in his hand, his arm resting in front of him on the surface of his mahogany desk.

“Pobre de mi patron . . .” one of the disaffected undocumented workers uttered before lopping off Kroemblin’s hand at the wrist with one fell swoop of the meat cleaver, “. . . piensa que el pobre soy yo.”

The gun fell out of his disembodied hand while the cleaver remained upright, lodged into the surface of his luxurious desk.

“Let’s take this piece of shit to the grinder!” Jack bellowed sialoquently.

Jack grabbed Kroemblin by the back of the neck and forced him to march out to the slaughterhouse floor. They climbed a steel staircase to a high platform where the mass of disgruntled workers and their outside agitator allies had a clear vantage point to see justice being rendered to the despised boss.

A chant arose from the slaughterhouse floor: “Ponle en la picadora! — Put him in the grinder!”

“Alright, but first we gotta make sure he fits–wouldn’t wanna jam the grinder!” Jack shouted in response to the popular demand.

Jack and Henry grabbed hold of Mr. Kroemblin by the arms and legs and began to heave and ho before tossing him off the platform. Kroemblin landed on his backside on a conveyer belt twenty feet below, breaking several vertebrae on impact. Rapidly he was swarmed by crazed cleaver-wielding packers.

“No more ICE raids!” a meatpacker shouted before slamming his cleaver into Kroemblin’s left shoulder.

“No more mandatory drug tests!” another employee shrieked, liberating one of Kroemblin’s hindlimbs from his pelvis.

“No more deportations!” a worker screamed, liberating another hindlimb.

“No more classist, sexist, and racist microaggressions!” another worker hurled, lodging his sharp cleaver into the boss’s other shoulder.

“No more capitalism!” the workers finally shouted in unison as they continued to dice Kroemblin’s carcass in a frenzy, like a school of hungry piranhas.

“And so the Empire crumbles,” Jack mused from above.

Suddenly, Jack felt a cold hand grasp his shoulder from behind.

“What the . . .” he muttered as he turned around. Before he had finished his sentence, he was kissing Ricardo’s high velocity wrist.

“Only the Socialist Militants Party has what it takes to lead revolution, you COINTELPRO bastard! The workers’ struggle will go no where without the vanguard to lead it!” Ricardo screamed.

Jack ducked and blocked Ricardo’s next swing, but Ricardo managed to grab hold of Jack by the neck, attempting to strangle him. Jack tilted his head forward, applying pressure to Ricardo’s fingers and slightly weakening his stranglehold before juking left and kneeing the treacherous fiend in the crotch.

Henry, having descended to the factory floor to participate in the dismemberment of Kroemblin, rushed back up the stairs to defend Jack and pummelled Ricardo in the kidneys, causing him to keel over.

Jack wiped away the blood from his swollen lower lip. “Fuck you, Ricardo,” he said. “The class struggle will go on whether your sect is there to try to co-opt it or not! Now get lost!”

Humiliated, Ricardo sulked away, never to be heard from again.

After grinding Mr. Kroemblin to a tender sludge, the workers mixed his remains with shiso and packed him into wholesome cans of SHAM, ensuring that no one would ever know what had become of Lawrence C. Kroemblin.

* * *

“I only came to work here to support my family in Mexico,” Diego, a line worker at Quality Ham Handlers, explained at the tentative first meeting of the democratic workers’ council which QHH employees had organized after appropriating the factory. “Without the remittances I send them, NAFTA would turn them into literal slaves.”

“Exactly. We all do what we have to do to survive,” said Jack. “None of us really believes in that ‘SHAM Town, USA’ image the chamber of commerce and the corporate bloodsuckers push.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” replied Henry. “At this point, SHAM is just running on nostalgia.”

“What do you mean, Henry?” asked Juan, another line worker.

“Minty meat was a terrible idea to begin with,” said Henry. “The only reason they added shiso was to cover up the taste of rot. During World War II, they had to be able to store the stuff for years at a time. It kept a lot of Allied troops alive on the front lines in Eastern Europe and the Pacific theaters. After the war, the shellshocked bastards kept eatin’ the stuff out of sheer force of habit. That’s kinda the root of SHAM’s All-American reputation.”

“Damn, how the hell do you know so much about SHAM’s history?” Juan wondered.

“My pa worked at Moorehall back in the day,” Henry replied. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stories he used to tell.”

“Yeah, I heard about that too,” said Jack. “Some scientific studies commissioned by the UN or somethin’ like that.”

“Not to mention,” another meatpacker named Priscilla chimed in, “I have serious ethical reservations about killing these animals. I mean, I try to put it out of my mind when I’m dismembering the poor creatures, but don’t they say that pigs are actually, like, super intelligent? And similar to us on a biological level?”

“Yeah,” Jack replied. “Sometimes, I could swear I seen their eyes cryin’ out for mercy just before I blast their brains out.”

“That wouldn’t even happen if those corporate bastards didn’t demand such ridiculous production levels and just slowed down the line a bit to give us the time to properly anesthetize the hogs,” said Henry.

“Them Fortune 500 fucks h’ain’t got time for that!” Jack grunted. “Hell, with the revolving door between the meatpacking industry and the Department of Agriculture, they can flaunt common sense food safety regulations without even breakin’ the law!”

“It’s time us workers set up some regulations of our own then!” Diego shouted.

“Yeah!” Henry screamed.

“I think we all know that SHAM production is socially irresponsible. The amount of resources it takes to fatten up the pigs and transport them is shamefully wasteful. It’s environmentally unsustainable. Plus, a lot of people are saying that the leakage run off is contaminating the river. There’s also the foul stench of the hog carcasses that permeates all around town. Not to mention, SHAM just tastes plain nasty,” Priscilla chimed in.

“What if we just stopped making SHAM and directed production towards something more ethical and socially useful?” Jack thought out loud.

* * *

Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months.

Coming to SHAM Town, USA to stand in solidarity with the meatpackers in their fight against exploitation, oppressive drug testing, and anti-immigrant bigotry was an enlightening experience for the thousands of outside agitators–workers, youth, high school and university activists, and full-time social justice community organizers–who had flocked to this flashpoint of struggle. After the meatpackers’ solidified their hold over the factory, the outside agitators went back to their homes in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Des Moines, Saint Louis, Omaha, Lincoln, Detroit, Pine Ridge, and Green Bay, bringing with them not only the news of the strange happenings in SHAM Town–news which the mainstream, corporate-controlled media tried hard to suppress–but also the wealth of practical knowledge they had acquired through direct participation in the class struggle, knowledge which was informing a radical new kind of praxis.

The meatpackers’ factory takeover became a glorious shining beacon of hope, an inspiring exemplum which working class folks throughout the Midwest sought to emulate.

People began to view police brutality, for-profit food production, scapegoating of immigrants, the War on Drugs, lack of healthcare and education, and environmental degradation not as disparate, isolated phenomena, but as an intricately interconnected constellation of oppressions; parts of one overarching system whose oppression manifested itself in a variety of ways. As more and more persons brought this perspective to bear on everyday social life, the government and the private sector’s control over the populace rapidly deteriorated, authentic democracy beginning to take root as groups of employees banded together to seize control of their workplaces, the masses of unemployed meanwhile looting corporate resource stockpiles which ought to have already been brought under public ownership.

Meanwhile, the transformation of the SHAM factory was a sight to behold in and of itself.

With the exception of Lawrence C. Kroemblin, the rest of the upper management, and the company’s loyal security goons, not another pig was ever again slaughtered at Moorehall Foods Corporation or Quality Ham Handlers, Inc. after the walk-out led by Jack McGillicuddy. Instead, following the establishment of a democratic workers’ council to manage the facility, the workers elected to transform the plant into an organic greenhouse farming co-operative. They grew a small amount shiso, but the main crop was weed. The sprawling abattoir floor provided ample space to set up the lighting needed to get the marijuana plants to grow to their maximum, yielding buds healthy as could be.

Neither the State of Minnesota nor the US federal government ever did get around to legalizing recreational cannabis; both collapsed under the weight of the awakened proletarian juggernaut before getting the chance to try to stave off the revolution by conceding that the draconian War on Drugs was little more than a scheme to fuel the privatized prison industry’s insatiable demand for exponential mass incarceration rate growth.

The last thing Biorgina Guerri could remember from the time of her life preceding her coma was the gnarled lips and pockmarked mug of the Contra comandante as he hammered off bullets, one by one, into her fellow Juventud Sandinista activists.

The year was 1986.

The ultra-reactionary guerrillas, armed and trained by the Reagan administration, had pulled the Sandinista youths from their beds one night, lined them up against a wall. The death squad’s leader, a man with greasy black hair and a sadistic twinkle in his eye, appeared before the bewildered and inexperienced Sandinistas and admonished them harshly for their Leftist beliefs.

“I’ll make an example out of all of you,” he finally spat, before drawing the pistol off his hip. It seemed his lengthy tirade had been intended less for the Sandinista youths before him than it was for the terrorized slum-dwellers listening through the thin tin walls of their makeshift hovels nearby.

Biorgina had known this would be a dangerous mission, but never did she anticipate that calamity should strike quite so soon. She and her compañeros, a handful of young idealists like herself, had embarked upon an aeroplane in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, a mere three days earlier. Their destination was the once prosperous, now poverty-stricken Caribbean port town of Bluefields. Naturally, given the war, they had come armed, but the Contras caught them off guard, sound asleep after a long night of mingling with the locals and singing cantos revolucionarios.

The move to Bluefields was part of a strategic Sandinista Youth counterinsurgency initiative to reach out and conquer the hearts and minds of the isolated peoples of Nicaragua’s East Coast. Separated from the Sandinista strongholds along the Pacific by the nearly impassable Central Highlands, Nicaragua’s Caribbean Lowlands were populated by the descendants of a convergence of Non-Hispanic European pirates, fugitive Africans (sometimes known as Maroons), and Indigenous peoples. This lowland area is known as the Miskito Coast and, with its distinct regional identity and history of autonomy, it presented a unique challenge to the revolutionary Sandinista government due to stark cultural differences which the imperialist forces were all too keen to exploit. Indeed, Bluefields had been a British protectorate until it was finally annexed into the Nicaraguan national territory in the late 19th century, and some of its people still held on to the misguided hope that another Anglo-American intervention would restore greater independence and economic prosperity to the region.

Biorgina swallowed, feeling dizzy. It was difficult to open her eyes, as the muscles had atrophied, rendering them hypersensitive to the light. Squinting, they followed the cracks of peeling paint on the wall before letting themselves rest on a portrait held within a crooked frame. A charismatic-looking man, vaguely paternalistic and wearing red star-emblazoned combat fatigues, stared back at her.

“Where am I?” she managed to vocalize, her heart beginning to beat faster as she became aware of the liquid feeding tubes occupying her nostrils.

“Mi corazón . . . ” the nurse replied, still in shock at the miracle of it, “you’re in Managua. Lenin Fonseco Hospital.”

Biorgina’s eyes widened in shock, momentarily indifferent to their fluorescent ecology. Her pupils were like black pimientos, bloodshot nexuses wrapped in pallid pickled olive irises. The strands of her charcoal-shaded mane undulated around her head, cradling it like the weaved together pliable reeds of a wicker basket. Overwhelmed by the blinding light, she then passed out. But a basket case she would soon be no more.

Biorgina felt a warm hand touch her on the shoulder as she came to again. This time, not only did she open her eyes, but she turned her head slightly. A handsome young man decked out in scrubs stood beside her bed.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he began. “My name is Doctor Rafael Delgado. Biorgina, you’ve been in a coma for a very long time. I’ve never seen a patient regain consciousness after such a long-term comatose period. This is truly . . . miraculous!”

“What . . . what year is it?” she asked.

“2016,” the doctor replied. He placed his hand upon her palm. “Biorgina, can you squeeze my hand?”

She gave it a remarkably firm squeeze.

“Very good! I must say, it is an honor to speak with a hero of the Revolución,” he said, almost making Biorgina blush as he continued, “You must know that your recovery will take some time. You need to take it easy for now. We will start you with physical therapy soon, focus on that, and then we can eventually enroll you in an outpatient program, get you readjusted to life on the outside. The world has changed a lot since the last time you were conscious.”

“Oh . . . thank you, doctor.”

On the street outside the hospital, the engine of a passing motor vehicle backfired.

“Ay, Contras!Get down!” Biorgina shouted.

Delgado grabbed hold of her. “Biorgina, it’s okay. The Civil War is over! The Contras are defeated!“

* * *

A typical day of treatment in physical therapy for Biorgina Guerri consisted in five hours of light and heavy exercises to rebuild her atrophied muscles and get her acquainted with her now forty-seven year old body. The physical therapists at Lenin Fonseco Hospital were astonished by the rapidity with which Biorgina regained her faculties. After two and a half months, she was lifting four and a half kilogram weights. By four months, she was walking, and by five months, she could run. It was, by all accounts, a miraculous recovery, unprecedented in the history of medicine.

Five months, two weeks, and three days after awakening from her thirty year coma, Biorgina was deemed fit for the next phase of treatment: a rigorous outpatient program. In this phase, Doctor Delgado informed Biorgina that she would no longer be required to stay overnight at the hospital. Moreover, her hours of physical therapy would be greatly reduced, supplemented instead by increased psychotherapy and counselling designed to help her come to terms with the loss of thirty prime years of her life and fully transition her mind to life in the 21st century.

Before signing the papers to officially discharge Biorgina and begin the outpatient treatment phase, Doctor Delgado connected her to a state housing program which would provide her with a fully furbished apartment. Unfortunately, Biorgina had no family left to go to. Her parents had long since passed away, while her siblings, also active in the Sandinista movement, had been made martyrs of the Revolution by the same damn Oliver North-funded, cocaine-peddling death squads that put her in a coma.

Later that afternoon, Doctor Delgado called for a taxi cab to come pick Biorgina up from the hospital and take her to her new apartment, located near Managua’s Xolotlán lake front.

“Alright. What do I owe you?” she asked the taxi driver after they had arrived.

“No jodas,” the driver retorted.

” . . . You don’t need any money?” She took out a handful of Nicaraguan córdobas, minted in the 1980s. The hospital staff had managed to safeguard the belongings she’d had on her when that Contra commando shot her in the head all those years ago.

“You a time-traveller?” the driver questioned with a raised eyebrow. “Nobody pays for anything in the Union of Central American Socialist Republics. Been that way since 1992. You know, when the A Cada Cual Según sus Necesidades Act criminalized monetary transactions?”

Biorgina looked at the taxi driver incredulously for a moment, thinking that perhaps he was joking, but it seemed he was dead serious. “Thanks,” she muttered, and walked up to her new home.

* * *

The next morning, Biorgina left her coins at home and made use once again of Managua’s free public transportation system to get to the mental health clinic to meet her new psychotherapist. His name was Ivan Moreno.

“Tell me, Biorgina, what is the last thing that you remember of the days before your coma?” Moreno said towards the beginning of their first session together.

“I was with my compañeros from the Sandinista Youth,” she said, recalling her teenage years in the thick of the Nicaraguan Civil War. “We had been distributing pamphlets and tortillas in the pueblo of Bluefields. Then, in the night, those malditos Contrascaptured us. I . . . I can’t remember what happened after that.”

“Try,” Moreno said.

“There was . . . this face. This ugly face. Knobbly, covered in bumps, like a gourd.”

Moreno sucked in a wisp of air through his teeth, gasping silently. He knew the man she spoke of: Jorge Peterson-Gonzalez. A US-backed right-wing militarist who had been trained at the School of the Americas, in the state of Georgia. The man with the wart-covered face was infamous in the Union of Central American Socialist Republics (UCASR). After fleeing to the United States in the immediate aftermath of the Sandinista triumph over the Contras in 1990, the Nicaraguans tried in vain to win his extradition. Following the unification of the Socialist People’s Republics of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Belize, and Panama, the UCASR continued to push for him to be brought to justice, but to no avail.

“The face . . . it went down the line, hammering off rounds into each compañero‘s head,” Biorgina sobbed.

“Jorge Peterson-Gonzalez . . . ” Moreno murmured.

Her brief bout of grief turned suddenly into utter outrage. “Who is this Peterson-Gonzalez fuck?” she shouted.

“Central America’s most wanted criminal,” Moreno explained.

“Where is he? Why hasn’t he been brought to justice?”

“In El Norte,” Moreno said. “Those damn Yankee imperialists have been harboring him for decades. After we finally pushed them out of Latin America, their society turned its depravation inwards. A scumbag like him is perfectly at home there.”

“Ivan, there’s so much I don’t understand about this world. What has happened? I see the people joyous in the streets. Housing and public transportation are free. Commodities are distributed according to human need. But still a murdering prick like this can escape justice?”

“Indeed, it is a travesty,” Moreno replied. “Though there was a bit of poetic justice when Ronald Reagan was executed for crimes against humanity after he was intercepted on his way to a meeting in Switzerland, back in 1994. The bastard thought his status as former head of state would give him diplomatic immunity, shield him from justice. Thankfully the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China used their influence in the United Nations Security Council to push for a stronger application of international human rights law. Reagan was arrested and swiftly brought to trial, judged by the same standards as Nuremberg. But those damn yanqui imperialists grew crafty after that. They did not risk sending their war criminal politicians abroad, where they knew that their pathetic Constitution would be overridden by international human rights law.”

“Híjoles, thank goodness at least one of them got a taste of justice,” said Biorgina. “That was such an uncertain time, 1986. Some people were saying that the USSR would not even last another five years. Dark times, they were. I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d have woken up in a world dominated by neo-liberalism and free market fundamentalist ideology, God forbid.”

“Yes, I remember the 1980s like they were yesterday,” Moreno replied. “Fortunately, the USSR was bolstered by the spread of Communism to Latin America. After the FSLN and FMLN seized power in Nicaragua and El Salvador, national liberation movements spread like wild fire across the region, thanks to help from our Cuban and Soviet allies, of course.”

“I only wish I could have been conscious to participate in these astonishing political developments myself,” Biorgina remarked. “Please, tell me more.”

“In Europe, the Warsaw Pact quickly took on more and more member states as the façade of liberalism crumbled when the Yankee imperialists were forced to withdraw their occupation forces to enforce martial law on the homefront. You see, the social eruption in Latin America turned Communism into a behemoth, one that they would have to reckon with on their own turf. In 1995, America plunged into its Second Civil War. The leftist forces were defeated in 2001, but at great social and economic cost. Millions of lives were lost, campaigns of ethnic cleansing swept the nation, and the country emerged a virtual fortress: a settler-state enclave of crazed gun-hording white sociopaths surrounded by towering anti-immigrant walls.”

“Ay,” Biorgina croaked. This was becoming upsetting. Her vision became blurred; her head was spinning.

“I’m sorry, Biorgina,” said Moreno. “Surely that was too much information to present you with all at once. We’ll continue bringing you up to speed with the 21st century in our next session. Until then, go out and enjoy life in Socialist Central America.”

Biorgina went back to her apartment. She ruminated on the injustice of it all. Thirty years, almost two-thirds of her life, had been robbed of her, and this Contra scumbag was still living as a free man. Biorgina’s rage-filled rumination quickly led her to the realization that her desire was nothing other than revenge.

The next day she went to her scheduled three hour psychotherapy session with Ivan Moreno.

“Good to see you again, Biorgina,” Moreno said, greeting her as she walked into his quaint office.

“Spare me the flatteries, doc,” Biorgina retorted agitatedly as she took a seat in his chaise longue. She reclined. “We both know what my successful recovery necessitates.”

“Errm, I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more explicit,” the psychotherapist said.

“Vengence,” Biorgina throated.

“Ah, sweet catharsis. We’re making progress here,” Moreno replied.

“Can the therapeutic bullshit, doc! All I want is to blast a damned bullet through that rat bastard’s forehead!”

“Biorgina, stop speaking like a blasted teenager. You’re a forty-seven year old woman!”

“Fuck you, Ivan! I am a damned teenager. I was una joven Sandinista when this shit began, and I’ll be una joven Sandinista when this shit is over!” She jumped out of the chaise longue and began pacing the room.

“Biorgina, please, a bit of calm,” Moreno breathed. “Let’s be rational here. If the whole state apparatus of the Union of Central American Socialist Republics has not been able to render Peterson-Gonzalez justice, what makes you think you can? You want to go into the belly of the beast? It’s a suicide mission. The border wall is fifty feet high, topped with barbed wire, and guarded by heavily armed Minutemen and other white nationalist vigilante groups. And even if you did make it in, the populace is racist as fuck, and armed to the teeth as well. Perhaps you could seek refuge in the Negro Reservations, but even that is a gamble.”

“That may well be, Ivan. But I’ll be damned if I don’t give it a try.”

Moreno leaned back in his armchair, a strange chill coming over him. He shivered and recalled how passionately he had detested the Contras back in the day. Was this really what he had become? Some old conservative hack discouraging a militant leftist from exacting revenge on one of the biggest scumbags on the planet?

“Alright, Biorgina. I can help you get into El Norte. It won’t be easy. But you will get in.”

“Ay, gracias, Ivan,” said Biorgina.

“My son, Ignacio, lives in the Autonomous Federation of Indigenous Soviets of Mexico. He is a coyote, smuggling Latinos across the border into the USA. He can help you enter that horrible country.”

“You mean to tell me our people still go there for work?” Biorgina questioned incredulously.

Biorgina continued therapy for another fortnight. After that discussion, her sessions with Moreno focused more on mental preparation for taking the life of another human being than on recovering her sanity or healing from her trauma.

“There is,” Moreno informed her during their last session, “a clandestine network of leftist radicals in El Norte which is still operational. They’ve been underground since 2001. My son, Ignacio, is familiar with many of them, as a major slice of their revenue comes from human smuggling. With their help, you may be able to track down Peterson-Gonzalez.”

* * *

Biorgina entered Mexico and met with Ignacio Moreno in Nuevo Laredo, close to the Texan border. Ignacio brought her with a fairly large group of Latino migrant workers through a subterranean tunnel which bypassed the border fence. After that she was clandestinely transported in a freight train to Des Moines, Iowa: one of several hubs of the Underground Resistance smuggling network. The journey was harrowing. She was locked in one of the freight train’s boxcars, alone with no food or water for almost a week. She made it, but she was practically emaciated when she arrived at the train depot in Des Moines. Too weak to even stand up. The train stopped and she sat there for hours. This is it, she began to think. This is the end. I’m going to die here, anonymously. Fucking Ignacio, he told me he made all the arrangements.

“This is the one,” she finally heard a muffled voice say through the metal.

“You sure?” another hushed voice inquired.

“Check the graffiti. You see it? The mark of the Underground Resistance sprayed over here.”

“C’mon, let’s do this before the bulls show up,” a third voice chimed in.

Biorgina saw the tip of a crowbar enter through a crack in the boxcar door.

“Goddamn. Let’s get you out of here,” a member of the Underground Resistance croaked as she laid eyes upon Biorgina.

Biorgina was quickly shuttled to a safe house and given food, drink, and a futon in the basement on which to rest. It took four days for her to fully recuperate her strength. At the safe house she got to know several members of the Resistance: the ones who had rescued her. Their noms de guerre were Gizella, Facundo, Zbigniew, and Bladimir.

“So this Peterson-Gonzalez dude,” Biorgina said to them one evening, “y’all heard of him?”

The single light bulb illuminating the basement of the safe house flickered. Cockroaches scuttled across the cement floor.

“We are certainly familiar with him. One of the most infamous figures of the Contra War,” said Zbigniew, taking a sip from a can of beer. “After the Second Civil War broke out in 1995, he was implicated in several anti-Black pogroms. The movement calling for his extradition to Central America became something of an international cause célèbre.”

“We have an idea of his general whereabouts,” said Bladimir. “Somewhere in the vicinity of Langley, Virginia. Rumor has it the militarist sod is working as an Evangelical minister now. Can you believe it? A murderous prick like that?”

“Yes . . . ” Gizella added, “there is a doxxing database, maintained by the Underground Resistance to keep tabs on an array of the petty bourgeoisie’s shock troops: right-wing activists and paramilitaries wanted by the international community for crimes against humanity committed during the Second Civil War. You’d be surprised how many of ’em ended up joining the clerical caste after the war. Must bring ’em some kinda relief, I s’pose, assuage the guilt somehow.”

“The preparations are under way,” Gizella replied. “We’ve been underground for fifteen years now. But if we make our move too soon, our whole network could be jeopardized. All that prep for nothing. You don’t even want to know what they do to captured members of the Underground Resistance in the internment camps.”

“Our network is growing more powerful by the day,” Facundo chimed in. “But Gizella is right. For now, we must lie in wait, make preparations silently. Build our organization, our infrastructure. Then, one day, the whole world will see what a miniscule cabal of deranged militants can accomplish!”

“But I know nothing of your Underground Resistance network. I’ve been in a coma for most of the last thirty years. Let me go after Jorge Peterson-Gonzalez. Even if I am captured alive, I will have little information to divulge, even under the severest of torture.”

“This Biorgina chick has a point,” said Bladimir to his comrades. “We could use someone like her. And such a brazen act of propaganda of the deed would surely help boost our numbers.”

“What you say is true, Bladimir,” Gizella conceded.

“Yes,” Facundo added. “If Biorgina were to succeed in carrying out an attack on Peterson-Gonzalez, it would be an incredible boon to the Resistance movement. I’m constantly hearing complaints from our recruitment officers that the recent lull in armed propaganda actions is putting a serious damper on our grassroots growth.”

“Say no more,” Zbigniew croaked, looking up from a somber laptop screen covered in oscillating columns of cascading and glimmering green characters. “The mission is already being prepped as we speak.”

* * *

It was Sunday morning. Biorgina rode in the back of a nondescript, sparsely windowed van headed for Langley, Virginia: the town where Peterson-Gonzalez carried out his ministry. Accompanying her were two members of the Underground Resistance. Their noms de guerre were Philomena and Kleon. The latter drove down Allen Dulles Memorial Parkway, about to exit onto Robert E. Lee Boulevard, while the former sat in the back with Biorgina, giving her all the last minute intel she would need to carry out the brazen assassination of Jorge Peterson-Gonzalez.

“If you want this shit to go down smooth, you’ll need to be quick,” Philomena said in a soothing tone that was, given the circumstances, remarkably calm and reassuring. “We’ll drop you off in front of the church, you run in there, gun the mofo down, we’ll circle the block, and if the coast is clear, pick you back up.”

“And if the coast isn’t clear?” Biorgina questioned.

“Well, you’re on your own.”

Biorgina anxiously swallowed nothing.

“You truly are a brave woman, Biorgina,” Philomena said as she put a warm hand on her shoulder.

Biorgina pulled back the bolt handle on the Cambodian-made Kalashnikov rifle she had been given by Zbigniew.

“Shit,” Kleon could be heard muttering in the front seat. A siren began to blare. He pulled over quickly, hoping to play it smooth and arouse as little suspicion as possible.

Biorgina and Philomena tried to hide themselves as best they could in the backseat during the tense few seconds between Kleon pulling over and the policeman approaching the van.

“Lahcense and registration,” the cop growled.

Kleon reached for his wallet.

“No sudden movements!” the cop shouted, taking a step back and placing his hand on his firearm, though leaving it still in its holster.

Kleon moved his hand more slowly.

“Mind if Ah have a look in back?” the law enforcer questioned.

Kleon knew he had to lie; the odds of the Fourth Amendment being upheld in this day and age were near nil. Flat out denying consent to a search would surely sound alarm bells in the copper’s mind.

“Sir, I’ve got to get to church. I’m taking Bibles to the Sunday school and they start in five minutes. Please don’t hold me up!”

The cop, being a devout Evangelical Christian, was genuinely affected by this appeal, but still wanted to make a quick search. “Step outer the vee-hickle, son. Now git back here an’ opener up.”

Kleon popped the lock, and the officer unhinged the back door of the van.

Biorgina had managed to hide her assault rifle before the officer saw the two women there.

“Say, you look purdy dark, miss. What race’re you?” the cop jeered at Biorgina, unhooking his walkie-talkie and garbling, “Got a racially suspicious individual, possibly a stray off the rez, pro-ceeding to brown paper bag test,” before she could even reply.

The policeman turned and went to his squad car to search for his government-issued brown paper bag, the official means by which the acceptable level of melanin a free individual could possess was measured.

Bam! . . . Bam! . . . Bam! A deafening succession of gunshots rang out like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. In total, Kleon had slammed off seven rounds of pistol fire into the copper’s back.

“Get back in the van!” Kleon shouted.

“Wait a sec,” Philomena replied before going into the police cruiser and kicking the dashboard cam off with her foot. She tossed it on the ground before grabbing the gun off the cop’s cadaver and slamming off a flurry of slugs into it. “Okay,” she breathed.

The trio of radical communists got back in the van and continued to make their way to Nuestro Señor de la Sagrada Contrarrevolución Pentecostal Church, the establishment where Jorge Peterson-Gonzalez carried out his ministry. It wasn’t much further. The church, located a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, served many of the families of the white Hispanic, School of the Americas-trained militarists who, after being driven out of Latin America, called El Norte their home.

“Damn, I don’t like this,” said Kleon. “You heard him radio in. Dispatch is gonna know something’s up when he doesn’t report on the results of the brown paper bag test. Better make this quick.”

Arriving at the church, Biorgina burst out of the van’s rear end. Churchgoers were trickling towards the front door. She raised her assault rifle menacingly and began to indiscriminately pepper the devout with gunfire. Knowing that she was in a Southern state, she just couldn’t run the risk of some armed bystander putting a stop to her. Biorgina then ran up to the front doors of the church, large and looming. She kicked them open and entered the ecclesiastical narthex. There she gunned down several more parishioners before swiftly making her way to the sanctuary doors. She paused a moment and loaded a fresh magazine into her Kalashnikov, ensuring that she would have enough ammo to take out any wannabe heroes.

The wart-faced militarist stood before the congregation, his jaw dropped in shock as Biorgina once again shouldered her rifle and began to pop off rounds into members of the congregation who had stood up and began running towards her, seemingly in an effort to bum rush and disarm her.

“Nadie se mueve!” Biorgina bellowed as another Pentecostal bit the dust. The congregation cowered in fear before the might of this feminine warrior. “Esto es para los mártires de la Revolución!”

Ratatatatat! Biorgina went trigger happy, pumping the militarist rat bastard full of lead. She then raised her fist in the air in a gesture once known as a Black Power salute, and hammered off several more rounds into the ceiling in an intense display of bravado.

Another churchgoer got up and attempted to bum rush Biorgina, but she heard his footsteps approaching and was able to turn and slam off a slug into the would-be hero just in the nick of time. Biorgina then kneeled down briefly, made the sign of the cross, and fled the scene.

Outside, Kleon and Philomena were just pulling up to the curbside, having circled the block.

“Quick, get in!” Philomena shouted.

The assault was so brazen, so swift, so unexpected, so close to the belly of the beast, that by the time law enforcement arrived on the scene, the perpetrator and her co-conspirators were already deep in the hills of West Virginia. Kleon pulled over near the peak of a bluff. The trio of left-wing extremists sat on some big rocks. Kleon pulled out a blunt and lit up.

Biorgina basked in the jubilance of successfully exacted revenge. Now that her mission was complete, she could go back to the Union of Central American Socialist Republics and do what she’d always wanted, before being side-tracked by this insane quest for violent vengeance: participate in the construction of a socialist society.

* * *

The Underground Resistance assisted Biorgina in making her way back to Mexico. First shuttled back to Des Moines by van, she was then once again stowed away in a freight train to Nuevo Laredo. Along the way, Biorgina could hear what sounded like acts of mass civil disobedience taking place. Effectively, the assassination of Peterson-Gonzalez had unclenched a wave of unrest and mayhem. Word of Biorgina’s brazen act of premeditated murder spread like a prairie fire among the members of the Underground Resistance. Impressed by her fearless direct action, members of the Underground Resistance began to emulate Biorgina nationwide. Assassinations, roadside improvised explosive devices, incitation to riot, you name it; countless new forms of propaganda of the deed began to shake the country to its very core. Negro and Hispanic Reservations, already overflowing with discontented working class folks, could no longer contain the underclass. The white bourgeois supremacist government responded swiftly with a rigorous implementation of martial law, but this only spurred the masses to fight with more tenacity and lack of sense of individual self-preservation. Instead, a spirit of collective preservation seemed to take over the masses’ consciousness. This proved Gizella’s and Facundo’s concerns about premature launch to be unwarranted: revolution had been long overdue, and now was the time to unleash its terror.

When Biorgina arrived in Nuevo Laredo, Ignacio Moreno was there at the opening of the people smuggling tunnel to greet her.

“Ay, tuviste suerte,” Ignacio began. “Everything’s gone to hell in El Norte! I didn’t think you would make it out alive!”

“Well, I did,” Biorgina croaked, dehydrated from the long boxcar ride.

“Ay, bet you could use some pinche agua,” Ignacio said.

Biorgina stayed with Ignacio for a couple of days, recuperating from the harrowing journey, before continuing on her way back home to Nicaragua.

When she got back to Managua, she took a free cab to her state-provided housing. She climbed up the steps of the apartment building. Neighbors were smiling at her, and she smiled back. She opened up the door to her apartment.

“Surprise!” a crowd of people shouted, Ivan Moreno and Doctor Delgado among them. Others included old members of the Sandinista Youth, some of whom Biorgina had worked with during the Contra War.

“Yes, and it’s bigger than Peterson-Gonzalez. Soon El Norte will succumb to the scourge of Marxian socialism!” Moreno added in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.

An old comrade from the Sandinista Youth approached with a bowl of tortilla chips and salsa, and shouted, “Let’s get this fiesta started!”

The party was pleasant, though not overly raucous. As it began to wind down, Biorgina sat on the couch with Delgado, Moreno, and several activists and watched television. A UCASR journalist was reporting on the ongoing revolution in El Norte, live from Washington DC, having arrived there through the Underground Resistance’s people smuggling network.

“Masses of youths have just stormed the United States Capitol Building. We’re receiving reports that other centers of governance are already under occupation as well,” the reporter spoke.

In the background crowds of rowdy and rough-looking individuals could be heard chanting, “No justice, no peace — fuck the po-lice!”

A strange man then jumped in front of the camera and proclaimed, “Sometimes you gotta get down and dirty, get them low vibrations, before you rise up, like the seed!“

Just then, blood began to splatter all over the screen. The National Guard was massacring the protesters.

Biorgina closed her eyes, a feeling of warmness enveloping her from below.

Meanwhile, back in Fairfax County, Virginia, Jorge Peterson-Gonzalez lay in a hospital bed, deep in a coma.